It comes down to practice. When I was learning to speak in public I had the same problem. I suggest start by learning some anxiety management techniques and then rehearsing a prepared speech and using it. As you do this over and over again, you will become more comfortable and get better at it. Don’t worry so much about sounding dumb at first but just keep trying, you will get better, but it takes practice. Also, learn to listen . . . a lot of times I used to be so busy thinking of what to say that I wouldn’t listen to what the other person was actually saying, and my replies would seem dumb. But for people like us, it just takes more work. That’s about all there is to it.

This is not uncommon. I majored in English throughout college and experienced the same difficulty. It was explained to me that there are several possible reasons for this. Here are a few:

1) Interaction with people places a lot more pressure on us to perform. Reaction to (and judgment of) what we say is much more immediate than response to an essay. The result is some degree of nervousness, which we tend to underestimate – it can have a much more negative effect on a conversation than you might think.

2) Your desire and ability to be eloquent on paper may flow over into your social life. You want to say the right thing, so you try too hard and stumble over your words.

3) With an essay, you can go back, revise, erase and correct what you wish whenever you wish. But we can’t take back what we say. Once it’s out, it’s out. More unconcious pressure on ourselves.

My suggestion: relax, pretend you are writing an essay when you strike up a converation. Don’t put so much pressure on yourself, or try to overanalyze what you are going to say before you say it. Besides, essays are by nature more formal. In everyday chit-chat, who needs to be “really eloquent”? It might come out as stuffy instead. Someone asked me once “Do you stuff your own shirts, or do you send them out?” LOL now, but not then. Just be yourself, not Cyrano.

Because you have to generate responses immediately. Some don’t find it easy to formulate a grammatical response and also have it be dynamic enough to match the situation, mood, etc. Some people who are really cerebral and intellectual miss the dynamics and non-verbal cues in a conversation. Read “a Mind at a time” a great book with insight into this.

Writing and speaking are two different skills. I’m sure when you wrote your essays you wrote more than one draft. When you speak there really aren’t any practice runs — at least not in conversation. Why do you think you don’t have good verbal skills? Has someone told you that or is that your own assessment?