Communication Skills

Half the marks in a moot court round can disappear before a single legal point is made — lost to a mumbled voice, no eye contact, arms folded across the chest. Communication Skills is the part of this paper that tests whether you can actually be understood, not whether you know a rule of drafting. It treats speaking and listening as skills with their own techniques, the same way the previous heading treated writing, and it is tested almost entirely through ‘tips for’ and ‘definition and improvement’ style questions rather than essay questions.

In two minutes

Communication Skills covers three linked topics — oral communication and its barriers, listening skills, and public speaking with interview tips — and every one of them is really asking the same underlying question: what, specifically, makes a message land or fail to land.

The rest of this chapter

The full explanation, the cheat sheet, every previous-year question at every mark weight, the quiz and the answer skeletons are part of English – II on LexBlox Semester. Sign in to unlock the subject, or read Module 1 of Legal Language and Writing free.