What are the four fundamental functions of verbal communication?
What are the four fundamental functions of verbal communication?
Answer: Verbal communication is the use of words to share information with other people. Verbal communication involves listening, speaking, writing and reading.
Listening: The most important part of verbal communication is to listen actively to properly understand the messages of the speaker and to reciprocate effectively in the conversation. A person must give conscious effort to listen actively. The listener should follow the following steps for active listening
- Positive Mindset: It’s crucial to open oneself and keep a positive mindset while listening to
- Active Participation: Engaging with the speaker provides a great help in active listening. This can be done by summarizing the key points frequently and speak the summary to the other
- Respect silence: If the speaker pauses, it’s best not to speak at that The listener must give the speaker chance to recollect or articulate his/her thoughts.
- Be Attentive to Non-Verbal Cues: The listener must be mindful about non-verbal cues like hand gestures, facial expressions, eye contact
- Make notes: If the conversation is important, it’s best to take The memory may not store the key points correctly for a long time.
Speaking: Speaking is the most common form of verbal communication. Effective speaking enables clear delivery of oral communication which allows the recipient to understand the message and reciprocate easily. The words used in speaking has to be appropriate for the audience. The voice tone is an essential component of speaking, and it may convey confidence to the listener in a favorable or bad way.
Writing: Written communication is an expected part of any organization and therefore, the writing skills of the employees must be sufficient to conduct day to day business of a company. Business writing must have clear purpose, accurate information, concrete writing and consistency. Writing style would differ in different types of documents. For example: a sales report will be factual and include statistics and market data whereas, a product description will include objective facts about a particular product in a storytelling context.
Reading: Effective reading is very important for any employee to succeed in his/her job. Effective reading enables the reader to comprehend the core message from the writing and understand the actions deemed necessary in response to the messages. To improve business reading skills, the reader must first understand the official language of the organization which is commonly English. So the reader has to be have basic vocabulary knowledge, common grammar knowledge and familiarity with professional correspondence.