Op-Ed Contributor: In the Debates, Interruption or Interjection?

"I'M used to being interrupted," President Obama said Tuesday night in his second debate with Mitt Romney, an event in which each man repeatedly cut in while the other was speaking.

The debates this year might be most remembered for the frequency (and ferocity) with which the candidates have interrupted each other. Nearly all commenters on the phenomenon seem to assume that it is self-evident when an interruption has occurred and who's at fault, and that interrupting violates the rules of conversation. But just as conversational styles vary widely by gender, ethnicity, geography, class and age, so do ideas about what constitutes interruptions, and whether and when they are good or bad.

The moderators know this. Critics lambasted Jim Lehrer for not interrupting the candidates more, seeing his not doing so as evidence that he'd lost control. But if his job was to get them interacting with each other as in a conversation, then the more they interrupted each other, the more successful he was.

Yet the criticism no doubt emboldened Martha Raddatz and Candy Crowley to interrupt the debaters for going on too long or off topic. It's a delicate business, because a moderator who interrupts risks being seen by viewers as rude. When Ms. Crowley told Mr. Romney she would "get run out of town" if she didn't stop him, she not only stopped him, but cleverly put the responsibility for doing so on others. The fact that these moderators were women complicated the challenge for the debaters, who were mindful of the need to appeal to, and not offend, female viewers.

How people perceive interruption is inseparable from their sense of relative power. This is particularly true in town-hall-style debates, where the line between assertiveness and aggression is thin. Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney frequently stood up on Tuesday to try to take the floor. Al Gore got into trouble when he walked into George W. Bush's space in 2000; Mr. Romney's aggressive posture in Tuesday night's debate — his hot to Mr. Obama's cool — risked offending viewers because he was a former governor confronting a sitting president, and a white man taking on a black one.

To be sure, a debate is as much about performance and rhetoric (and snappy one-liners) as it is about meaningful dialogue. But our ideas about conversation inevitably shape how we perceive the debates. This means, for example, that what seems an interruption to one viewer might be merely an interjection to another. Conversation is an exchange of turns, and having a turn means having a right to hold the floor until you have finished what you want to say. So interrupting is not a violation if it doesn't steal the floor. If your uncle is telling a long story at dinner, you may cut in to ask him to pass the salt. Most (but not all) people would say you aren't really interrupting; you just asked for a temporary pause.

So when Representative Paul D. Ryan told Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., "Sometimes the words don't come out of your mouth the right way," and Mr. Biden retorted, "But I always say what I mean," some viewers no doubt considered that an interjection, not an interruption.

Speakers can exploit the sense that they have a right to finish their turn, but demanding that right can backfire. Members of the audience gasped when Mr. Romney told Mr. Obama, "You'll get your chance in a moment. I'm still speaking." A courteous "Please let me finish" might have been looked on more favorably.

How much can a listener talk and still be a listener rather than a wannabe speaker? For some the limit is a word or a phrase like "Exactly," "Yeah, right," or maybe even "I know what you mean." But for others it can be much more — "I know, the same thing happened to me" — or even a short story that expands a topic another speaker raised.

Deborah Tannen is a professor of linguistics at Georgetown and a 2012-13 fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.