The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-defense, Volume 1

Front Cover
Dorset Press, 1980 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 310 pages
Don't turn the other cheek and fume quietly; know what to say when someone throws out the snide backhanded "compliment," subtle insult, cruel criticism, or outright verbal blow. Inside these pages is an arsenal of tools for fending off that attack and neutralizing the harm spiteful words inflict. Learn to identify modes of verbal assault, such as laying blame, and to recognize when someone is about to launch a linguistic strike and the motivation behind it. Sample scripts prevent you from getting tongue-tied, and a progress journal helps you use voice and body language for maximum effect. Find out how to handle the eight most common types of verbal violence, and redirect and defuse potential verbal confrontations so skillfully that they rarely happen. Special suggestions are included for college students, men, and women, and for handling emergency situations such as an angry crowd.

From inside the book

Contents

The Five Satir
7
5
47
Attacks
65
Copyright

10 other sections not shown

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (1980)

Suzette Haden Elgin was born Patricia Anne Wilkins on November 18, 1936 in Missouri. She received a PhD in linguistics from the University of California at San Diego in 1973. She taught there from 1972 to 1980, when she retired to focus on her writing full time. Her books include The Communipaths, Furthest, At the Seventh Level, Yonder Comes the Other End of Time, Twelve Fair Kingdoms, The Grand Jubilee, A First Dictionary and Grammar of Láadan, Peacetalk 101, and Native Tongue Trilogy. She founded the Science Fiction Poetry Association in 1978. The organization's Elgin Award, for best poetry book and chapbook of the year, is named in her honor. She wrote The Science Fiction Poetry Handbook. She was also widely published as a linguist. Her works include the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense series. She died on January 27, 2015 at the age of 78.

Bibliographic information