Chapter 19 opens by asking readers to reflect on prior collaborations, writing down their views on what makes people easy to work with and what makes them hard to work with. The chapter argues for a team-based approach to public engagement, and suggests ways to build effective teams. Also, it’s important to trust our partners at informal learning venues, as they have expertise on the audiences and logistics in these settings. Emphasizing that communication with these partners is still a conversation, the chapter returns to the principles of a successful conversation described in Chapter 3 and unpacks each one with reference to venue partners. A case study exemplifies these points, describing a partnership between university students and faculty and museum professionals. Details are given of negotiation about institutional missions and daily operations through to a demonstration on children’s science practices in a game about vowel sounds. This chapter’s Closing Worksheet asks readers to make a detailed plan for getting their demonstration into a specific place or event.

Chapter 3 opens by asking readers to recall a problematic conversation like an argument. It reviews what the language sciences have learned about what people expect when going into conversations, what makes conversations go horribly wrong, and what makes them run beautifully. The chapter emphasizes four principles of a successful conversation: The Maxim of Quality is described as a rule to tell the truth. This rule relates to people’s conversational expectations, as well as to our credibility as experts. The Maxim of Quantity is described as a rule to say as much as you need to but not more. This rule relates to respect because adjusting how much we share to what our listeners already know requires finding out about them. The Maxim of Relevance is described as a rule to stick to the point. This also relates to respect because adjusting what we share to what our listeners want to know also requires finding out about them. The Maxim of Manner is described as a rule to be clear. This relates to both style and substance, again emphasizing adjustments for our audiences. This chapter’s Worked Example shows how an airport staff morale problem stemmed from violated maxims.

Contrary to a view of the Linguistic Landscape (LL) as a collection of road and traffic signs, commercial signage, graffiti inscriptions, and other physical objects, this chapter treats the LL as discourse. In this approach, a visible unit of the LL is understood to mediate between a sign instigator and a sign viewer. The sign viewer is often a passing stranger whom the sign instigator will try to engage as an interlocutor. While the sign viewer’s reply is usually not articulated linguistically, it can be understood in light of the viewer’s subsequent behaviour, understanding, affect, or other modes of reply. The LL unit is seen as a performance which displays text in particular ways that are shaped by the pragmatic intentions of the sign instigator, discourse framing, and LL genre. This perspective argues against the restriction of the LL to written units. Urban diversity in the LL is thus understood in terms of a set of separate but interrelated discourses. In addition to examples of conversational maxims and speech acts at work, the chapter examines the overseas Irish pub as a complex LL genre, using data from New York, Chicago, Montreal, Liverpool, and Vienna.

Statham analyses dialogue in a sequence from the TV series The Sopranos. He illustrates the complexity of communication by analysing how textual features work together with camera perspective, shot, gaze and action to orchestrate a character’s realisation of betrayal.