The Importance of Effective Communication

(Spun off from the Krugman thread but still related in a way)

There's a saying I've learned "Business communication to achieve business results" and it speaks volumes about the importance of clearly and effectively conveying whatever message you want to say to achieve a desired result.

Take the issue of global warming. You as a scientist have evidence that supports your cause*

and you need to convey it to folks to convince them a certain course of action concluded in your models is needed. Your target audience is going to be everyday folks, business owners and executives and politicians, hardly an academic crowd so speaking in academia is going to be offputting and achieve a negative result for what you want. But speak in a simple yet clear and effective tone such as "If we do this, we'll stop the oceans from rising" you are far more likely to achieve the business result you are looking for.

The scope of effective communication runs the full scale and cares not what the truth or the idea is. Poorly communicated truth will fail to effectively communicated lies. Conversely, an intelligent idea that cannot be explained to a non-academic will fail against a moronic idea that everyone can understand owing to being communicated effectively.

Thus we have the rationale in order to achieve results. If you want to convince others especially those who can support your endeavor you must communicate on their level and in their language.

"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."

Yes. It's important. Most academics fail at this. The world would be a better place if they didn't. Ah well, I guess...

Maybe "Effective Speaking 101" should be a required college course for everyone and if you don't get at least a B you retake it?

I am now known as Flyboy.

A speech course is required where I live once you get to college. How effective it is is up for debate. I... did not find it that helpful.

Some people are good at speaking and can even make a shitty as all hell speech decent. Some cannot.

Speech is required at my college. Not a very instructive course though.

Fight smart, not fair.

It's inporant too not how too spaek proper like.

hashtagsarestupid

Or maybe they'll hir e a good communicator to give statements.

If you don't like a single Frank Ocean song, you have no soul.

Let's eat Grandpa!

Let's eat, Grandpa!

Commas - saving lives since... whenever they were invented.

(edit: commans... i am derp)

edited 21st Sep '11 4:27:15 PM by pvtnum11

Happiness is zero-gee with a sinus cold.

I didn't know commans saved lives... I thought commas would, though.

Question: Would the implications of certain words have an impact? Such as "Entitlement" or "Saving" versus "Privatizing"

Very big Daydream Believer. "That's not knowledge, that's a crapshoot!" -Al Murray "Welcome to QI" -Stephen Fry

^ Word choice plays heavily into the message you send and its effectiveness.

"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."

Yes. This is why you hear terms like "Job Creator" instead of "insanely rich", or "Pro-choice" instead of "supports abortion rights"

They sound far more crowd pleasing.

^lets not go there.

hashtagsarestupid

Communication it helps people from being sent to jail or jumping itno a river filled with bull sharks.

Clearly Texas needs more effective public speaking classes. Or more effective teachers. Or we need more than just one measly semester of it in order to get the credit/actually learn the lessons presented to us.

But yeah, communication has to be one of the hardest things to both learn and teach. Especially since there's apparently far more fear of public speaking than of death.

People should learn how to read statistics properly. Otherwise you get newspaper articles that say things like "X chemical/activity/food quadruples your risk of getting Y cancer!", without adding "But the original risk was only like 0.00000000001%, so it's still not that much."

Be not afraid...

Yep. some people are so terrified of it that they manage to get through half a minute of a 5 minute speech before running out of stuff to say.

I'd say poor teachers make it worse (fuck you for not believing people can prefer being alone). Bad standards make it worst.

Loni, you'll get that regardless of whether or not people know statistics, because reporters want to mislead people into reading the drivel they wrote.

Fight smart, not fair.

That doesn't mean we have to make things easy for them.

Be not afraid...

I've never had a speech teacher who said anything along those lines. O-o Being alone never even came up in mine; just the basics of making a persuasive speech and trying to make it through without getting stuck. Did you just get smacked in the face with weird teachers or something?

Deboss just has a tendency to view even slight inconveniences to his interests as horrible affronts to him, in my experience with his posts.

No, I literally had a speech teacher explicitly tell me that any one who says they prefer being on their own is lying.

It's more that I view Fan Dumbing to be an affront to basic decency and something we should do our absolute best to eradicate from human activity.

edited 20th Sep '11 1:40:01 AM by Deboss

Fight smart, not fair.

Public Speaking is very easy. Just imagine your audience naked.

I find it's better to just flip my emotions off. That does tend to hinder my ability to inspire, but I never plan to go into politics anyway.

Fight smart, not fair.

Why is the whole "imagine your audience naked" such popular advice? It makes absolutely no sense, and I would rather not do that. Does it actually help a significant number of people speak in front of a crowd more effectively?

Yeah, that never worked for me. I just looked at peoples foreheads instead of their eyes when I was a nervous speaker. To them, it still looks like you're looking them in their eyes. Worked quite well.

"Delenda est." "Furthermore, Carthage must be destroyed." -Common Roman saying at the end of speeches.