Chapter 2 Verbal and Nonverbal Communication

Objectives and Requirements

After learning this chapter, you should be able to:

When talking about communication, quite a few people would immediately think about verbal communication, namely the words that we say to express information. While verbal communication is important, humans have also relied on wordless cues for thousands of years before they developed the capability to communicate with words. Think about how you cannot help making gestures when having a conversation on the phone even though the other person cannot see you. The fact that nonverbal communication is processed by an older part of our brain makes it more instinctual and involuntary than verbal communication. Rather than thinking of nonverbal communication as the opposite of or as separate from verbal communication, it is more accurate to view them as operating side by side—as part of the same system. Yet, as part of the same system, they still have important differences. One of the most important ones is that there are rules of grammar that structure our verbal communication, but no such official guides exist to govern our use of nonverbal signals. Likewise, there are no dictionaries and thesauruses of nonverbal communication as there are with verbal symbols. That is why nonverbal communication can be ambiguous sometimes and relies very much on context. These are just some of the characteristics that differentiate verbal communication from nonverbal communication. In this chapter, we will discuss in more detail the functions, and major types of nonverbal communication before concluding with some guidelines on how to improve some aspects of our communicative competence.