5 Ways You Are Hurting Your Ability to Communicate

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Employers, teachers and professors have complained for years that there has been a sharp decrease in the ability of Americans to communicate effectively. Writing skills for students have fallen through the floor, and college writing centers are staffed with the very students who would once have been told by their professors to make use of the writing center themselves.

Written communication is not the only method of communication that has suffered in recent years. Both oral and presentation skills have declined as well. Plenty of college graduates truly believe that the only real way to give a presentation is to put together a text-heavy PowerPoint and read the bullet points to their audience. Basic conversation skills have also suffered. Many people have no idea how to actually hold a conversation with a stranger. As such, daily interactions with coworkers can be painfully awkward, and dates are not much better. Everyone has experienced the terrifying moment on a date when they suddenly have no idea what to say to the person sitting across from them. Those moments of drawn out silence, however, last longer and longer anymore. People give one word answers to even the people they claim to want to get to know.

Communication skills seem to be a dying art, but why is that? Why has it become an unusual talent to be able to hold a simple conversation with a stranger? Part of the reason is that there are a variety of common habits that can negatively impact a person’s communication skill. Here are five ways you are hurting your ability to communicate.

Handling Emotional Matters in Writing

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Love poems and hate mail have long been a part of the modern experience. While they stand at the opposite ends of the emotional spectrum, both are an attempt to convey powerful feelings through writing. This can be cathartic for the writer and either moving or terrifying for the reader. As intense as emotional writing can be, though, writing is rarely the best way to handle matters that are wrapped up in intense or complicated feelings. When handling matters in writing, most people stick to facts and statements. They avoid the extended metaphors and detailed descriptions that allow emotion to come through the written word. As such, a note that is meant to be soothing or loving comes across as cold or distant. A message that is meant to be a gentle correction or constructive criticism is seen as blunt and harsh. Tone of voice is incredibly important for understanding emotional matters, but that tone is absent in writing. People are forced to read whatever tone they imagine into the words. When the reader reads a different tone than the writer meant, it can lead to all sorts of problems.

Emotional conversations are uncomfortable which is often why people prefer to handle such matters through writing. Words on paper or on a screen can act as a buffer between two people’s emotions. That buffer, however, keeps people from the connection that needs to exist in order to handle an emotional matter successfully. This is why asking someone on a date or breaking up with a partner through email, text or social media message is a disaster waiting to happen.

Not Reading Regularly

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Everyone knows the person who hated reading in school and was thrilled when they graduated because they were convinced they would be able to go the rest of their life without really reading. They could skim a headline or read the occasional article, but they would be free of books and essays forever. Unfortunately for them, reading does not stop being important simply because a person no longer has to write book reports or write research papers.

Reading is essential for those who want to improve and hone their communication skills. Reading exposes people to new words which increase a person’s vocabulary. It also increases a person’s empathy and ability to focus on another’s words. Both of these are essential for good communication. Reading can also help people understand and remember how the give and take of a conversation is supposed to work. Dialogue in books is structured to read like an actual conversation and thus can serve as a good model for actual discussions especially if the reader has rusty conversation or social skills.

Avoiding Face to Face Conversations

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As a general rule, skills that are not used are lost. This is true of everything from the ability of a person to do mental math to speaking a second language to throwing a perfect fastball. If a person does not use their skills, they will lose them. Basic communication skills are no exception to this rule. A person who does not have face to face conversations regularly will forget how to have one.

Face to face conversations require different skills than writing reports or typing out emails. Talking to someone in person requires reading their tone of voice, facial expression and their body language as well as monitoring your own. Nonverbal ques actually make up the vast majority of communication. This is why it is possible for two people who do not speak the same language to manage to mime and muddle their way to an understanding. If a person does not practice reading and sending nonverbal ques, however, they will soon find themselves struggling to talk to a person face to face and, potentially, developing problematic social anxiety.

Reliance on Visual Aids in Presentations

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When most schoolchildren are asked to give a presentation today, they probably turn immediately to creating a PowerPoint or similar slideshow. They pick a pretty background for their slides, stick an image on a few of those slides and fill the rest with endless bullet points. When the time comes to actually give that presentation, the student stands at the front of the room and reads the PowerPoint bullets. This is perfectly acceptable for a person’s first presentation, it is not how an executive should present to shareholders or a college student should be defending their senior capstone project. Unfortunately, most people have forgotten how to do a presentation that is not heavily reliant on visual aids like PowerPoint.

Visual aids should enhance the presentation, not be the presentation itself. When visual aids essentially are the presentation, they distract people from focusing on the presenter and allow for the presenter to get away with essentially reading off a slide or screen.

A transcript of a person’s speech can also count as a visual aid. When giving a speech, a person is best served to have notecards or a list of bullet points that will help them stay on track, but they should not be reading their speech word for word off a piece of paper. It is usually abundantly obvious when a person is doing this, and it is painfully boring for a person who is listening. Like every other form of communication, perfecting public speaking skills requires a person to actually practice public speaking. Most people would prefer to lose the ability rather than get up repeatedly and speak in front of a crowd.

Clinging to Smartphones

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Smartphones have a lot of advantages. They allow people to look up directions and phone numbers on the go and allow people to store more contact information than an address book could ever hold. They also, however, have helped to destroy people’s communication skills. With the rise of the smartphone, more people text and message each other than actually talk on the phone. This allows people to walk away from a conversation when they get uncomfortable and come back to it later rather than having to muddle through those potentially unpleasant emotions. It also allows people to carefully script and consider their every response. This means that when they go to have an actual conversation with someone, they are at a loss as to how to handle the natural spontaneity of face to face interaction. Phones also give people a convenient escape for when the conversation falls into a natural lull. Unfortunately, rather than dealing with the brief awkward pause and finding a new topic of conversation, people disappear into their phones and never really return to their conversation partner.

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Communication seems to be a dying art in modern America. Some of the most common habits found in people today are killing their ability to communicate. They rarely use their communication skills, and so those skills begin to rust and decay. People are often at least subconsciously aware of this and avoid using their unpracticed communication skills in order to avoid embarrassment. This, however, only rusts a person’s skills further which makes them even more reluctant to use them. If you want to improve your ability to communicate, you need to actually use your communication skills regardless of how rusty they are. If you do not use them, you will never improve them. So, step away from the phone and computer, go strike up a conversation and put those skills to use.