Art of Communication

Civilized society owes almost everything to the ability of communication. It is through properly exercised communication skills that people can become leaders, organize people, understand each other, and ultimately progress. It is an art form that is thousands of years old and is still being developed. Communication unexamined may be thought as just made up as verbal expressions. In more recent centuries researchers have studied the way people express their thoughts to one another and have found that it is much more complicated than just formulating coherent sentences. There are many different ways one can say the same exact phrase and mean completely different things. Also the effects of communication are not just contained in verbal expressions. The way one moves while they take, the way they hold themselves, whether or not they make physical contact, or can maintain eye contact, all of them give away much more information than was originally intended by the speaker.

There are many different tones in which one can speak. Certain things can be said in a dead pan voice to convey boredom or disinterest, while the same exact thing can be said with exuberance and convey a strong interest in something. Lots of things that people say are not completely conscienciously controlled. When someone is upset sometimes that person cannot control the loudness or coarseness in their voice. It is believed to be forced by the emotion they are feeling at that point in time, and whether the speaker likes it or not, the receiver knows that the speaker is infuriated.

Nonverbal cues are the hardest to disguise the true intent of someone's expression. Often people do not even know what kind of emotions they are expressing just by the way they are sitting. In general when one is engaged in a conversation with someone else, they will lean a little towards that person or at least in some way be faced more towards that person then away. This shows openness to what that person is saying rather than someone who is saying they are listening but facing away from the person. A lot of people pick up on these clues and whether it is intended or not, their emotions are deciphered through the physical rather than what is heard through conversation due to the fact that in speech it is much easier to deceive.

It is important to remember that to have a conversation both people must be actively participating. When someone is talking, the receiver has two options, to listen or to let what is being said fall on deaf ears. In order to get the information that one is trying to express the recipient needs to be actively thinking about what the speaker is saying and picking out the meaning that is being given. When someone is listening they are engaged in understanding what one is saying. Someone may be in the vicinity of a speaker and not actually register what is being said because they have not devoted any attention to it and thus be just hearing what is said