Improved Communication Skills

Communication is usually described along a few major dimensions: Content (what type of things are communicated), source / emisor / sender / encoder (by whom), form (in which form), channel (through which medium), destination / receiver / target / decoder (to whom), and the purpose or pragmatic aspect. Between parties, communication includes acts that confer knowledge and experiences, give advice and commands, and ask questions. These acts may take many forms, in one of the various manners of communication. The form depends on the abilities of the group communicating. Together, communication content and form make messages that are sent towards a destination. The target can be oneself, another person or being, another entity (such as a corporation or group of beings). Communication can be seen as processes of information transmission governed by three levels of semiotic rules: 1. Syntactic (formal properties of signs and symbols), 2. Pragmatic (concerned with the relations between ...

The first step in planning an oral presentation involves acknowledging two fundamental differences between oral and written communication. One essential goal of oral communication is to make personal contact with the audience, and to help connect them to the content. Reading a written report aloud is not usually an effective strategy for engaging with the audience. The needs/preferences of the audience play an even larger role in oral presentations than in writing. The content of presentations should be prepared with this goal in mind. Second, oral presentations are fleeting (or time-sensitive). If readers get lost or stop paying attention for a few minutes, they can always flip back a few pages. Listeners, on the other hand, usually can’t interrupt the speaker and ask that s/he start again and go back a few minutes. Once words are uttered, they vanish. Presenters can account for the fleeting nature of oral presentations by making sure that the presentation is well organized and by mak...