Oral Communication
Last update: 21 August 2002
 
You may recall from the discussion of The Communication Process that, as individuals and as a species, we have far more experience with nonverbal and oral communication than we do with reading and writing. For this reason, reading and writing seem more difficult for us, and we typically spend a lot more time studying them than we do nonverbal communication, speaking, and listening.

Oral Communication before TV

As long as oral communication was the primary means of sending and receiving information, people were careful to develop their speaking and listening skills. Even as late as the turn of the twentieth century, the oral communication skills of the educated were excellent. Because people still relied on oral communication to convey complex messages, conversation was a well-developed art. Reading aloud, dinnertime discussions, and conversations about current events, politics, and religion occupied people’s attention in the same way television does today.

Today we’re not likely to be so careful about our oral communication as were our turn-of-the-century relatives, even though most communication is still oral. Most of us spend much more time speaking and listening than we do writing and reading. It’s true that in modern organizations, writing and reading are generally preferred to speaking and listening for more important, more complex messages.

The Typewriter and Oral Contracts

The invention of the typewriter is primarily responsible for the reliance of modern organizations on written communication. At the turn of the century, oral agreements constituted the only contracts in a wide variety of business transactions because written contracts were too much trouble to bother with unless the situation were very complex and the sums of money involved were large. Relying on oral communication, however, presented problems.

Because people tend to hear what they want to hear regardless of their intentions, individual recollections of what was said may change over time. Before the typewriter, people probably paid closer attention to what others said and took more care with what they said themselves. Literal veracity was expected, assumed, and relied on. We still value that kind of oral honesty—we all admire someone whose word is his or her “bond.”

Also, because most oral communication occurs spontaneously, people have less time to consider the impact of what they are saying before they say it. People tend to associate the message and the messenger, so that those who deliver bad news orally may be forever associated with that news. Conversely, appearance, mannerisms, and other nonverbal behaviors of the presenter may influence a message that needs to be evaluated objectively.

The need for records in modern organizations, the increasing ease with which records could be created and stored, and the fact that no two people ever remember a conversation the same way have combined to reduce the perceived importance of oral communication. The saying became, “an oral agreement isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.” In a reaction against the way things had been done, organizations became overprotective and increasingly legalistic. Everything was put in writing.

The Advantages of Oral Communication

In recent years, however, organizations are rediscovering the importance of oral communication. Written contracts may be the legal instruments that finally determine who performs what action for what compensation, but the quality—and meaning—of relationships between people (and ultimately between organizations) will be determined by what they say to each other and how they say it. Written communication, in spite of its abilities to provide a relatively permanent record and convey complex information, remains essentially a substitute for oral communication.

When handled skillfully, oral communication can provide a clearer insight into the meaning of a message because message transmission and feedback are immediate (see the System/Process Model in the section on Models of the Communication Process). In most oral communication situations, we do not have to quit until we understand and have been understood. The give and take of a discussion, for example, can achieve consensus much more readily—and quickly—than a written exchange of the same information.

Another advantage of oral communication is that as we speak and listen to one another, we have the opportunity to explore each other and our individual relationships to the message more fully than we do in writing. We can watch and listen for congruence between the verbal and nonverbal components of the message and for words and ideas set off by analog marking, as illustrated in the section on “Advanced Language Patterns” in Language Skills.

The term oral communication covers a broad range of communication activities, including greetings given when two people pass in the hallway, a formal presentation to a large audience, and everything in between. This section will cover the following topics:

 

http://homepages.wmich.edu/~bowman/oral.html