The art of effective communication

Writing articles or texts is a practice that almost everyone in our society does. It is one of the most basic exercises in schools when you learn the basic principles of your native language in elementary school and when you learn a foreign language in secondary education. Not only in subjects related to language, however, do you need to know how to write articles and texts, but also in many other subjects where you have to present an argumentation to a particular problem. These topics are almost every other ones which are not directly related to the natural sciences, where it is important to know regularities to examine a phenomenon closely and relate it to other concepts or formulas.

When focussing on subjects and topics related to language, it is, therefore, not difficult to see that you put great emphasis on argumentation and build up an opinion of yourself and that you also learn to persuade other people with the help of your argumentation. That is, by the way, one of the most important aspects of every communication process, apart from the fact that you want to transport a message to your communication partner. Dependent on the complexity of the topic, you need more or fewer words to build up your argumentation and to make sure that your partner understands you. That is, of course, also dependent on the level of knowledge your partner has.

When we speak of communication and of building up an argumentation on an individual topic, we not only do so while we talk to our partners about it. Another way of communication is also writing texts. The only difference here is that the reader of a written passage cannot directly respond to the content we sent. Not only that. By writing the content which we want to share with other individuals, we conserve it in some way, so that we can send it away via the Internet or on paper and our receivers can read it afterward.

Another question that is important in this context is the fact that every piece of content we create to communicate with others, we also need to develop in some way. Not only do we need to think about what we are going to communicate but also how do we like to develop it. Especially when it comes to the structure of our argumentation, that is critical so that our partner even has a chance to know what we want to tell them. So we need to connect relevant facts to our central point. Only that way our partners can understand us. It is, therefore, understandable that just giving our central point is not enough that people can know us after all. As a result, we need to provide them with a certain amount of material which gives enough background to get the point.

When we generate content which we later want to use for effective communication, we need to articulate it in some way so that the receiver can read or hear it. Looking at those two ways of sending a message, either by reading or listening, you might see that you need to consider both the strengths and weaknesses of these two communication methods. Among the most important aspects here is the fact that writing takes much longer than speaking. That means, in other words, that we can create much more spoken content at the same time as we can do while we write. In theory, it is, therefore, wiser to speak to others instead of writing them, when we purely look at the creation time. Sadly, it is not only possible to transmit information via speaking, for we often communicate with people who cannot hear us while we speak. Therefore, clever people comprised a program which can transcribe audio to text information and thus gives us the possibility to create written texts just by speaking out the facts we want to point out to our audience and readers. Consequently, that saves us a lot of time focusing, for example, on our ideas to build up what we want to tell the others instead of wasting our time by writing down all we need to so that people can understand us.