Chapter 5 - The Verbal Dimension of Communication Flashcards
What is a symbol?
A representation of a person, event, or other phenomenon.
What is the key to understanding symbols?
To realize that they are arbitrary, ambiguous, and abstract ways of representing things.
What does arbitrary mean?
They are not intrinsically connected to what they represent
What are two primary tasks of military intelligence?
To invent secret, unbreakable codes and to break the secret codes of others.
What does ambiguous mean?
Their meanings aren’t fixed in an absolute way.
What does abstract mean?
Not concrete or tangible
What are the principles of verbal communication?
- Interpretation creates meaning
- Communication is rule guided
- Punctuation affects meaning
What are communication rules?
Shared understandings of what communication means and what kinds of communication are and are not appropriate in various situations.
What are the two kinds of rules that guide communication?
- Regulative rules
2. Constitutive rules
What are regulative rules?
They specify when, how, where, and with whom to talk about certain things.
What are constitutive rules?
They define what communication means by telling us how to count certain kinds of communication
What is punctuation in verbal communication?
It is the mental mark of the beginnings and endings of particular interactions.
What is the demand-withdraw pattern?
When one person tries to express closeness and the other strives to maintain autonomy by avoiding interaction.
What are symbolic abilities?
- Symbols define
- Symbols evaluate
- Symbols organize perceptions
- Symbols allow hypothetical thought
- Symbols allow self-reflection
How do symbols define?
We use symbols to define experiences, people, relationships, feelings, and thoughts.
What is totalizing?
Using a single label to represent the totality of a person. We fixate on one symbol to define someone and fail to recognize many other aspects of who he or she is.
What is loaded language?
It consists of words that strongly slant perceptions and thus meanings.
What is stereotyping?
Thinking in broad generalizations about a whole class of people or experiences.
What is hypothetical thought?
Thinking about experiences and ideas that are not a part of your concrete, present situation.
What does the ability to self-reflect do?
It allows us to think about who we want to be and set goals for becoming the self we desire.
Self-reflection also allows us to do what?
Manage the image we project to others
What is face work?
Our ability to manage how we appear (because it involves controlling the face we present to others)
How to do we enhance effectiveness in verbal communication?
- Engage in dual perspective
- Own your feelings and thoughts
- Respect what others say about their feelings and ideas
- Strive for accuracy and clarity
A. Be aware of levels of abstraction
B. Qualify language
What is dual perspective?
It involves taking another person’s point of view into account as you communicate
Our feelings and thoughts result from what?
How we interpret others’ communication, not from their communication itself.
We should rely on __-language instead of _____ - language
I; you
What are the two differences or I-language and You-language?
- I-statements own responsibility, whereas You-statements project it onto another person.
- I-statements offer more description than You-statements.
What two types of language should be qualified?
- We should qualify generalizations so we don’t mislead ourselves or others.
- We should qualify language when describing and evaluating people.
What is static evaluation?
It consists of assessments that suggest that something is unchanging or frozen in time.
What is indexing?
A technique developed by early communication scholars that allows us to note that our statements reflect only specific times and circumstances.
What is the foundation of improving all effectiveness of verbal communication?
Engaging in dual perspective
