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Who really said it

Let Us Make a Special Effort to Stop Communicating with Each Other, So We Can Have Some Conversation

Not Mark Twain — Judith Martin, writing as Miss Manners Judith Martin born 1938 · American etiquette columnist, ‘Miss Manners’
Disputed In copyright

Mark Twain died in 1910 and there is no evidence he wrote this. Quote Investigator ↗ traces it to Judith Martin, whose syndicated “Miss Manners” column of September 1979 opened: “The new social season being now upon us, let us make a special effort to learn to stop communicating with one another, so that we can have some conversation.” The version in circulation drops “to learn” and swaps “one another” for “each other”.

Last verified 21 Sep 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

For presentations

Put it on a slide

Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“Let Us Make a Special Effort to Stop Communicating with Each Other, So We Can Have Some Conversation” Not Mark Twain. Judith Martin, writing as Miss Manners, 1979 — and her sentence ran “let us make a special effort to learn to stop communicating with one another, so that we can have some conversation.”

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Mark Twain. Use the credit shown above instead.

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by Judith Martin / United Features Syndicate; Andrews McMeel and the book’s publishers). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool

In context

Evoking the world of Judith Martin — American columnist and etiquette authority. Theme: "Let Us Make a Special Effort to Stop Communicating with Each Other, So We Can Have Some Conversation". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Let Us Make a Special Effort to Stop Communicating with Each Other, So We Can Have Some Conversation". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

The source

Written by
Judith Martin, as “Miss Manners” (United Features Syndicate)
Earliest documented
“Miss Manners: Stop ‘communicating’ and start conversing”, The Bulletin (Bend, Oregon), 1 September 1979, p. 19, col. 1
Also in
Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior (1982), chapter “Social Intercourse”, p. 165 of the 1983 Warner Books reprint
Popularly credited to
Mark Twain (1835–1910) — no supporting evidence

The new social season being now upon us, let us make a special effort to learn to stop communicating with one another, so that we can have some conversation. Miss Manners, September 1979

That is Martin’s opening sentence as Quote Investigator reproduces it from the 1979 column. The familiar version is shorter by two words and swaps one pronoun — the sort of smoothing that makes a line easier to repeat and easier to lose track of.

Quote Investigator: “Let Us Make a Special Effort to Stop Communicating with Each Other…”

How we verified this

  • We read Quote Investigator’s article ↗ in full. It finds no substantive evidence for Twain and notes the line is absent from Barbara Schmidt’s TwainQuotes.com, the standard checking tool for Twain ascriptions.
  • QI’s earliest citation is the 1979 Miss Manners column, printed in The Bulletin of Bend, Oregon on 1 September 1979 at page 19 and in the State Times Advocate of Baton Rouge on 3 September 1979 at page 3B.
  • The same sentence, in the longer form, reappears in Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior — QI cites page 165 of the 1983 Warner Books reprint of the 1982 Atheneum edition, verified with scans.
  • We checked Wikiquote directly in both directions: the Mark Twain page ↗ has no entry for this line in any section, and the Judith Martin page ↗ does not carry it either — so the only documentary trail runs through QI’s newspaper citations.
In copyright

First published in a syndicated newspaper column in 1979 and reprinted in a 1982 book, both far later than the 1931 boundary for U.S. public domain. The text belongs to Judith Martin and her syndicate and publishers. The misattribution to Mark Twain, whose own work is largely public domain, is probably part of why people assume this line is free to use.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

Often misattributed

This is a textbook case of a misattribution with a traceable mechanism — not a vague drift, but a specific page in a specific book where the wrong name was sitting one line away.

Mark Twain No evidence

Twain died in 1910, sixty-nine years before the earliest instance Quote Investigator ↗ could find. QI also reports the line is absent from TwainQuotes.com, the reference database it treats as the checkpoint for Twain ascriptions.

The Book of Classic Insults (1999) Adjacent-quote transfer

On page 130 of Tom Steele’s anthology the simplified sentence appears credited to Miss Manners, directly beneath a Twain quotation about good breeding. QI’s reading ↗ is that a reader looking up for the attribution instead of down carried Twain’s name onto Martin’s line.

“…stop communicating with each other, so we can have some conversation” Simplified, not original

That 1999 anthology is also where the words “to learn” were dropped. Martin wrote “learn to stop communicating with one another, so that we can have some conversation”.

A 2003 Quoteland forum post Early user, not origin

QI records the Twain-credited version circulating on the Quoteland forum by 2003, unvetted by the site’s administrators — an ordinary step in how an anthology slip becomes an internet fact.

Judith Martin wrote it as Miss Manners in September 1979, and Quote Investigator ↗ concludes the Twain credit was manufactured by a 1999 anthology’s page layout.

Context

Why it mattered

Martin’s column was needling a very 1970s habit: the therapeutic imperative to communicate, meaning to disclose everything about yourself to anyone standing nearby. Her joke was that this had replaced conversation rather than improved it.

The rest of the column makes the target obvious. People in communication mode, she wrote, “tell everything about themselves with complete honesty, holding back nothing except their last names”.

“Holding back nothing except their last names.”

Read the full story

Judith Martin began the Miss Manners column in 1978 at the Washington Post, where she had been a reporter and critic. It has run in syndication ever since, and the deadpan third-person voice is the joke as much as the advice is.

The line is now quoted constantly about social media — which it predates by roughly three decades. Its survival is a fair test of Martin’s point, since it mostly travels stripped of its author and half its wording.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Character Wisdom

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Let Us Make a Special Effort to Stop Communicating with Each Otherquoteinvestigator.com

The full investigation: no Twain evidence, the 1979 Miss Manners column, and the 1999 anthology that caused the slip.
Judith Martinen.wikipedia.org

Biography of the columnist who writes as Miss Manners.
Mark Twainen.wikiquote.org

Wikiquote’s sourced and misattributed Twain lists — this quotation appears in neither.
Mark Twainen.wikipedia.org

Biography confirming Twain died in 1910, sixty-nine years before the earliest documented instance.
Judith Martinen.wikiquote.org

Wikiquote’s sourced Judith Martin page — checked, and it carries no entry for this line either.

The author

About Judith Martin

Judith Martin

born 13 September 1938 · American columnist and etiquette authority

Judith Martin (born 1938) is an American journalist who has written the syndicated etiquette column Miss Manners since 1978, after years as a reporter and critic at the Washington Post. Writing in a mock-formal third person, she treats manners as a serious subject and modern candour as a menace, and has turned the column into a long shelf of books.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

The earliest documented source (Chicago)

Martin, Judith. “Miss Manners: Stop ‘communicating’ and start conversing.” United Features Syndicate. The Bulletin (Bend, OR), September 1, 1979, 19. Cited in Quote Investigator, “Let Us Make a Special Effort to Stop Communicating with Each Other, So We Can Have Some Conversation,” October 28, 2013.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Let Us Make a Special Effort to Stop Communicating with Each Other, So We Can Have Some Conversation’?” Last verified 21 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/let-us-make-a-special-effort-to-stop-communicating-with/

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