Understanding Non-Verbal Communication :: Papers Body Language Tone Voice Verbal

In its most basic form, communicating involves a sender who takes his or her thoughts and encodes them into verbal and non-verbal messages that are sent to a receiver. The receiver than decodes the messages and attempts to understand what the sender meant to communication. The communication is completed when the receiver transmits verbal and nonverbal feed back to indicate his or her reception and understanding of the message. This process takes place within a context; also know as rhetorical situation, which includes all that affects the communication process such as the sender-receiver’s culture, the sender-receiver‘s relationship, the circumstances surrounding the sender-receiver’s interaction, and the physical environment of the interaction. Because the basic communication process is the same in every situation, there are some similarities across all types of interactions. Just the same, each interaction remains distinct and therefore each rhetorical situation will be different. For example, think about how you communicate with another person in the library and at a party. In both cases, you are sending messages and reacting to feedback. But the rhetorical situation of the library means that you will be speaking in whispers, whereas at the party you will be speaking much louder and with more animated gestures. If you were to switch style, whispering at the party and yelling at the library, then, your communication style will be ineffective to day the least. In both situations, you are engaging in the same communication process, but the rhetorical situation requires you to act different ways. Verbal communication is simply using spoken language to convey a message to other people. However, nonverbal communication is far more complicated, it contains the use of object, body language, actions and symbols to show meaning to people. In fact, it’s not easy to define non-verbal communication, because â€Å"experts disagree about whether count unintended action as nonverbal communication.† (http://maine.maine.edu/~zubrick/tren5.html, 28/4/2005) Non-verbal communication is deceptively important in how we express ourselves , and it plays a huge part in child’s development into