INTRO TO CONVERSATION DESIGN
Interested in making a transition to Conversation Design? Check out the following references:
Salesforce Trailhead: Conversation Design.
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A free, interactive, online tutorial made by yours truly! Learn the basics of conversation design and linguistics for the craft. If you love lighthearted humor, taking quizzes, and vibrant visuals, this will totally be your jam. And, you can earn a fancy Salesforce Trailhead badge in the process.
Conversation Design Institute.
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CDI has excellent, thorough trainings on Conversation Design across the interaction design, copywriting, and training aspects of the role. They also added discourse markers to their curriculum at my request, so I'm biased, but I'd say they're pretty great.
Deibel, D. and Evanhoe, R. (2021). Conversations with things. New York, NY: Rosenfeld.
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The go-to reference text for anyone in conversation design. Diana and Rebecca have produced a much-needed update for the field that spans language diversity and multimodality across platforms.
Tannen, D. (2011). That's not what I meant! New York, NY: HarperCollins.
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Whenever anyone asks me about the kind of linguistics I specialize in (interactional sociolinguistics, discourse analysis), I always recommend this book. Deborah's work on conversational style sits at the foundation of my entire approach to conversation design and her book is an absolute page-turner.
Alim, H.S. and Smitherman, G. (2012). Articulate while black. New York, NY: Oxford.
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If you're looking to learn more about the double bind of speakers of minority language variants, I can't recommend Profs. Alim and Smitherman's work more. Every conversation designer needs to keep power, appropriation, and access in mind when producing a conversational experience.