Oral Communication –Barriers to Verbal & Non-Verbal Communication, Tips for effective communication — Activity

A client explains their problem clearly, in perfect sentences, and the young lawyer across the table still misunderstands the request — because the lawyer was checking a phone, gave no eye contact, and answered in a tone that suggested boredom rather than attention. The words were fine. Everything around the words failed. Oral communication is judged as a package, and this topic exists to separate that package into its parts: what can go wrong in the words themselves, what can go wrong in the body language around them, and what specific habits fix each kind of failure.

In two minutes

A barrier to oral communication is anything that stops a message from being understood as the speaker intended, and it falls into two families — verbal barriers, in the words and language used, and non-verbal barriers, in tone, posture, gesture and expression — with a third, quieter family of psychological and physical barriers running underneath both.

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.