Some people are natural-born communicators. They appear to be able to communicate freely and fluently both verbally and also in writing. The psychology of this area is not well understood but it is clear that for the majority of people, clear concise communication skills are not a natural gift but rather something that needs to be developed and honed. Incidentally, this is not the same thing as being verbose and talking non-stop!
Clear communication is of course critically important. Battles have been lost and disasters caused because of sometimes almost unbelievable communication misunderstandings. In the final analysis, if you’re on a plane coming in to land in bad weather, would you be comfortable thinking that the pilot and air traffic control have a less than perfectly clear understanding of what each other are saying?
Communication can be seen as coming into four categories
- Verbal
- Written
- Non-verbal (body language etc)
- Absence (saying nothing to indicate agreement or disagreement etc)
In the case of speech, practice is often key. Many people rarely speak other than socially to their immediate friends and family. They may speak perfectly clearly but freeze-up when speaking to authority figures or in a public forum. This is a lack of confidence issue that can only really be dealt with via practice and perhaps a training course to help with the development of public speaking skills.
Others in their professional lives, struggle to clearly express themselves verbally. If you’re in this category, it’s often advisable to avoid being ‘too keen’ to charge in with your contribution and to also take an extra second or two to think thru’ in advance what you’re planning to say before you say it. This may help avoid the endless strings of ‘Er..’ and ‘Um…’ that can otherwise result.
Speak at a sensible speed and don’t try to rush. It’s also a good idea to work hard on keeping your sentence structures short and simple and avoid long complicated words and phrases. Also, don’t give in to the temptation to always go for the last ‘smart’ word when speaking – you just end up babbling on when in reality there is nothing left to say.
Communication is two-way and reciprocal. If you’re making a speech or delivering a monologue then fine but if you’re engaged in dialogue or conversation, remember to actually listen and pay attention to what others are saying.
Strictly speaking, in written communications perfect spelling and grammar is not entirely necessary to convey meaning. As an example ‘an sentence wrote can be understoud even if it maked big ereurs’.
Unfortunately, readers of text containing major spelling and grammatical errors are immediately inclined to dismiss the content as not worth reading or taking seriously – however meritorious it may be in reality.
What can be equally damaging to your communication efforts are overly long sentences and paragraphs, poor structures and ambiguity.
Any piece of written work should have a beginning, middle and end, so avoid unstructured rambles, rants and ‘brain dumps’ in your writing. Try to ensure that your written work always has something recognizable as ‘a conclusion’ rather than just an end that’s left hanging in mid-air.
Big blocks of text without punctuation can also put off many readers, so keep sentences and paragraphs short and sweet if you want to get your communication actually read.
If you’d like to give confusion and chaos a miss, then make your writing specific rather than ambiguous. It’s better to run the risk of stating the obvious than not stating what you’re trying to achieve. For example, discussing 5 individual items in a letter then concluding “This one is the most problematic” is likely only to confuse the reader as to which of the five you’re actually talking about.
Non-verbal communication skills are often overlooked and they are different in that they may be involuntary. Yet they’re critically important.
You may have first-class verbal and written skills but if you look like you’ve just crawled through the jungle upon arrival for that job interview, well, you’ll be communicating things to the interviewer you may not intend.
If you’re speaking to someone, constantly looking away and breaking eye contact communicates uncertainty, discomfort and often shiftiness to the other party. Fidgeting in formal situations can communicate that possibly some lies are being dished out or that you’re not at all happy with what’s being said. Constant flamboyant arm waving and hand gestures when speaking can communicate that you’re an agitated type and slumping in a chair can lead people to deduce that you’re either lazy, not very interested or are recovering from last night’s excesses – and possibly all three!
The bottom line here is – try to keep your body under control and read-up on body language!
Finally, a big one if you want to avoid catastrophic misunderstandings. Remember that saying nothing (being ‘absent’ from dialogue) can be taken any number of ways.
Some people may think you’re obviously too dumb to have understood what’s going on and you therefore have nothing to contribute as a result. Others may think you’re in such fundamental disagreement that you can’t bear to speak. Yet others may take your silence as indicating that you totally agree.
Whichever is the case in reality, make sure you communicate exactly what you feel and what you agree with and plan to do or not do as a result. Don’t ‘hope’ that others will have correctly interpreted your silence!
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