NCERT Book Class 11 Home Science Effective Communication Skills

7.1 M eaning of communication skills

• Communication skills are the abilities to use language (receptive) and express (expressive) information. Thus, communication skills are the abilities that help us send and receive information effectively. These can be natural or acquired.

• Communication skills refer to the range of behaviours that serve to convey information to another individual. This process requires one or more of the skills of thinking, speaking, listening, reading, writing, visualising and body language. This set of skills enables us to express and receive information under different situations in different ways.

• Psychologically speaking, the set of behaviours that serve to transmit and share common information to create a mutual understanding of the content being shared are termed as communication skills. Communication skills are thus the ability that enables a person to share information consistently and effectively with a variety of audiences to create mutual understanding of the content being shared. These include the art or technique of persuasion through the use of spoken and written words, code and content sequence, treatment to content and body language used, visualisation and thinking towards configuring the contents according to the audience and the situation.

Communication skills are needed both for sending and receiving information. The one who sends the message needs to have the skills to think, visualise and design the intended message considering the type of audience, their needs and interests. The five Ws and one H need to be taken care of by the sender: What? Where? Why? When? Whom? and How? Similarly, the one who receives the message needs to receive the message without assumptions, placing biases aside and actively listening, viewing or reading the contents, often in-between the lines. It is said that nature has provided us with two ears and one mouth just so that we listen more and talk less. But do we follow that? The receiver needs to use one ear for words and the other ear to feel what is being said. This will help the receiver to have better understanding of the message.