Many of us pay a great deal of attention to being effective communicators. Still, one little word, firmly planted in the middle of many sentences, could be negating what we say and turning people off to our messages: But.
"It acts like a mental eraser and it often buries whatever you’ve said before it," says Colleyville, Texas communications consultant Dianna Booher, author of What More Can I Say: Why Communication Fails and What to Do About It. "It makes communication spiral down instead of spin up."
