Guest Post: Anuj Gupta

Anuj is one of Chris' Summer 2010 Professional Speaking students. Here he writes about real-world oral communication.

Can you imagine a world without any sort of communication in it? Not really. It has become an integral part of our lives and is as critical as breathing. Although there are many forms of communication, one of the most influential ways is ‘oral communication.’ This is because we can convey our message blend with real emotions. We can express grief, anger or happiness, which is really hard in other forms of communication like written.

Most of the communication we do is done verbally. This makes oral communication all the more important. It is used for various purposes like presentation, persuasion, conversation, etc. But differences in culture, accent and language make the whole process of communicating verbally difficult. Moreover with the ever increasing knowledge base it is getting tougher and tougher to keep the communication concise. In such a scenario, it is important to understand your audience and keep them in mind while communicating. This can make a big difference in the effectiveness of your communication.

It is also important to understand the fact that speaking and listening both are integral part of communication. Generally people tend to forget the listening part and concentrate only on speaking which adds to clutter. Unlike speaking and writing, we are never trained on listening which makes it all the more essential to enhance our listening skills. This can be done by creating a desire to listen, getting rid of both mental and physical distractions, reinforcing the speaker and giving him feedback in the form of questions. This actually makes the overall experience better for both speaker and listener and leads to an effective conversation.

In my previous work experience, I used to converse with people from the UK on a regular basis. The first few days were really difficult for me as instead of listening to them during meetings, I used to concentrate more on what I would be saying next. But as I started to know more about my audience and started focusing more on the listening part, life became so much simpler. The conversations became meaningful and we were able to get some action points out of every meeting which is an essential feature of effective communication.