Communication Skills

Good communication skills are the cornerstone of a successful career. Whether you are the CEO of a Fortune 100 company or an entry-level employee at a small business, you need to learn how to communicate your ideas in order to work effectively with other people. Likewise, you need communication skills for interpersonal relationships. Unfortunately, many people misunderstand some of the basic concepts of communication or have trouble using strong communication tools in their day-to-day lives.

There are many different types of communication skills, including written skills, telephone skills and face-to-face skills. You should try to develop each skill group over time. At different points of your life, you might need to persuade a coworker to help you with a project or sell your business’s services to a large group of people with a public speech.

Each type of communication requires a different but altogether similar plan of action. In order to communicate clearly, you will need to understand how diction, body language and emphasis will affect your listeners. You will need to plan your interactions carefully. Good communicators also need to listen effectively and avoid communication-related problems like accidental plagiarism.

The articles listed below will help you develop these types of skills and learn how to communicate clearly with individuals and groups. We have arranged over a dozen articles into several groups to give you quick help with specific types of communication and a more successful approach to your personal and professional relationships.

Business Communication

5 Tips for Improving Communication in the Workplace – Poor communication in the workplace can lead to low morale and lack of productivity, which inevitably will have a negative impact on the bottom line. Even when operations seem to be going well, it can be important to review whether the lines of communication need to be improved. Luckily, getting all the employees on the same page is not difficult to do.

Interpersonal

23 Conversation Starters for Any Situations – Sometimes, the only thing standing between two people and a great conversation is an icebreaker. Rather than relying on rehearsed one-liners, however, try using these opening ideas to help you start conversations.

Sensors and Intuitives Communication Styles – At some point in your life, you may have found yourself unable to get a point across to another person. This frustrating experience may have been a result of basic differences in the way individual humans perceive and process information.

Interviewing and Telephone

How A Phone Interview Is Like A First Date – Looking for a new career? Your phone interviewing skills could be the deciding factor in getting a live interview. The phone interview is “KEY” to your job campaign success.

How to Talk on the Telephone. Duh. – A telephone call may be the first and only communication you have with a potential employer or friend. Don’t blow it and make it your last call with the person just because you never took the time to hone your telephone skills.

Persuasion

3 Manipulation Techniques to Plant An Idea In Someone’s Mind – If you’ve ever bought something even though you knew you didn’t need it and didn’t really want it, but couldn’t seem to tell the salesperson no, then you know you were manipulated. However, manipulation isn’t always so obvious.

3 Nonverbal Hacks to Improve Your Credibility – Perceptions can be hacked. If needed, we can appear more credible by changing our nonverbal communication. Many of these hacks also help with awareness for those who do not realize their current nonverbal displays are killing their chances at being the most credible person in a room.

Plagiarism

Consequences of Plagiarism – It is all too easy to copy-and-paste blocks of text into their document. As said above, some students do it by accident; others are simply lazy. Whether done on purpose or not, the consequences of plagiarism can be severe.

How to Avoid Plagiarism – Integrity is one of the most crucial aspects of academia, business, and personal growth. Plagiarism is an alarmingly common form of intellectual dishonesty, and the consequences for purposeful or accidental plagiarism can be devastating.

Public Speaking

5 Ways Not to Bore Your Audience – If you are ever to be asked to do a presentation in front of people either at school, work or at a social event like a wedding, you definitely want to do your best so that you are not labeled as a boring presenter. Here are a few secrets and tricks that will help you make it over to the good presenters side rather than the boring speakers camp.

How NOT to Lose your Audience in your Presentation – By following some good hiking advice, your speech can keep the audience engaged and on the same happy trail as you.

How to Overcome the Fear of Public Speaking – A fear of public speaking is completely normal, but just like any fear, it can be conquered. To help you accomplish this, here are four tips that will show you how to overcome your fear of public speaking.

Improve Your Speaking by Listening – To Yourself – Rather than trying to better both our content and delivery, it often helps to target specific parts of our presentation. The delivery component has two parts: verbal and nonverbal. This post addresses one specific part – verbal delivery.

Pre-Speech Writing Tips: 3 1/2 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Turning Your Computer On – It’s a problem we see over and over as presentation skills trainers – the first thing someone does when they’re told they need to make a presentation is turn on their laptop, fire up PowerPoint and begin to type. That’s wrong in a lot of ways!

Speech Outline – Improperly organized ideas are likely to be confusing, and a lack of direction can haunt a speaker for the duration of the speech. To avoid confusion and generate structure, use the following speech outline to ensure that essential elements of the speech are best organized to suit the speaker and the crowd.

Why Speak? The Importance of Public Speaking – Speaking is a great exercise that helps in many aspects of our life. Here are three reasons why you should practice speaking to improve not only your communication skills, but your life.

Social Media

Dos and Don’ts of Credible Tweets – Researchers took a look at how Twitter users determine whether or not a tweet is credible. The researchers culled their findings to come up with ways you can make your tweets more credible.

How to Write Eye-Catching Tweets – With the advent of social media and dwindling attention spans, PR professionals and social media managers are challenged to pack a lot of punch into short messages. One of the most challenging mediums is Twitter, which limits a message to 140 characters. Knowing how to craft a message that catches attention is a talent, but there are also some tried and true methods that can make even the least poetic of fingers produce something eye-catching.

Social Media Message Management – Just like it has changed our social interactions, social media has found its way into almost all aspects of business, from marketing to hiring. Many businesses are using social media as an online reputation management tool and have systems in place to monitor the web for any mention of their name or brand. That diligence will often carry over to a company’s hiring managers, so if you’re looking to land a new job, it might be time to do some social media management of your own.

Thesis

How to Write a Thesis Statement – Academic writing can be intimidating, especially for an individual who is new to this type of composition. One important aspect of many academic papers is a solid thesis statement. Here is a how-to article on generating a quality thesis statement.

Writing

Active and Passive Voice – Active and passive voice are both perfectly legitimate means of constructing a sentence. However, some publications, institutions, and instructors prefer the exclusive use of active voice. It is difficult to exclude passive voice without being able to recognize it. This article teaches you how to tell the difference between active and passive voice and when to use each.