Communication Skills and Their Importance

Communication is Integrated into All Parts of Our Lives

• Academic: Communication skills are linked to academic success and even students with poor communication skills can improve with training.
• Professional: Employers highly value good communication skills in college graduates.
• Personal: Having a vocabulary for communication phenomena increases self-awareness and communication control for goal achievement, avoiding miscommunication, and learning from mistakes.
• Civic: Civic engagement, improving community quality of life, raising social and political awareness, and participating in political and non-political processes rely on communication.

Communication Meets Needs

• Physical Needs: Communication (through brain, mouth, eyes, ears) impacts physical well-being and fulfillment of basic bodily needs.
• Instrumental Needs: Communication helps achieve short-term and long-term goals by influencing others, obtaining information, and getting support.
• Relational Needs: Communication builds, maintains, and ends social bonds and interpersonal relationships, fulfilling the need for social connection.
• Identity Needs: Communication allows presentation of self and shaping of how others perceive us, aligning with our desired self-image.

Communication has Ethical Implications

• Ethics and Right vs. Wrong: Ethics involves reflecting on and negotiating right and wrong within communication.
• Aristotelian Ethics and Communication: Actions should be appropriate in the right extent, time, motive, and way.
• National Communication Association (NCA) Credo for Ethical Communication:
  • Promotes freedom of expression, diverse perspectives, and tolerance for dissent.
  • Condemns hate speech and communication degrading to individuals.
  • Encourages courageous expression of convictions for justice and fairness.
  • Advocates responsibility for communication consequences.

Forms of Communication

• Intrapersonal Communication: Communication with oneself through internal vocalization or reflective thinking, influenced by internal or external stimuli. It helps with social adjustment and self-concept development.
• Interpersonal Communication: Two-way communication between people whose lives mutually influence each other. It builds, maintains, and ends relationships, and is more structured than intrapersonal communication.
• Group Communication: Communication among 3 or more people working towards a shared goal. Often used in academic and professional settings, it focuses on task completion.
• Public Communication: One person conveying information to an audience. It is intentional, formal, and goal-oriented.
• Mass Communication: Public communication reaching a large audience through print or electronic media (newspapers, magazines, TV, websites, social media). It requires a specific technology for transmission.

Globalization

• Trade: Worldwide increase in trade, especially by large companies operating in multiple countries.
• Homogenization: Similar goods, services, social and cultural influences across the globe.
• Interconnectedness: Closer global economic, cultural, and political ties due to increased travel and communication.

Communication and Globalization

• Opportunities: Technology facilitates communication and sharing of services across the world.
• Cultural Awareness: Increased understanding of diverse cultures and languages.

Afro-Asian Culture

• Culture: Learned through socialization and shaped by shared patterns of behavior, values, beliefs, and norms.
• Africa:
  • Strong sense of hospitality and welcoming guests with traditional gifts.
  • Emphasis on communalism and group unity.

Listening

• Visual Cues: Visual signals influence message interpretation.
• Environmental Noise: External sounds (traffic, conversations) interfere with hearing.
• Psychological Noise: Internal stress or emotions disrupt cognitive processing of information.
• Interpreting: Combining visual and auditory information, using schemata to make sense of messages.
• Recalling: Memory limits affect information retention. We forget half of what we hear immediately after, 35% after 8 hours, and 20% after a day.
• Evaluating: Assessing the credibility (truthfulness), completeness (understanding context), and worth (value judgments) of information.

This quiz explores the multifaceted roles of communication in various aspects of life, including academic, professional, personal, and civic contexts. It emphasizes how effective communication can enhance self-awareness, engagement, and the achievement of goals. Test your understanding of the critical functions communication serves in our daily lives.