Communication Skills and Interpersonal Skills
Communication is the exchange of meaning; interpersonal skills are the abilities you use to build and maintain relationships. The exam tests the communication process, verbal and non-verbal signals, listening, assertiveness and barriers to understanding.
Core concepts
- The process runs sender, encoding, message, channel, receiver, decoding, feedback. Noise - physical, psychological or semantic - can distort any stage. Feedback makes it a loop, not a straight line.
- Non-verbal communication includes kinesics (posture, gestures, body movement), paralanguage (tone, pitch, volume, pauses), proxemics (use of space) and eye contact. It usually carries emotion better than words.
- Active listening: give full attention, do not interrupt, paraphrase ('So you mean…'), ask open questions and summarise. Hearing is physical; listening is deliberate.
- The 7 Cs of an effective message: clear, concise, concrete, correct, coherent, complete, courteous.
- Assertiveness sits between passivity (your needs ignored) and aggression (others' needs ignored). An I-message states the feeling, the situation and the request without blaming.
Worked example
A classmate keeps borrowing your notes and returning them late. Passive reply: say nothing and resent it. Aggressive reply: 'You are so careless!' Assertive reply: 'I feel anxious when my notes come back after the test, because I need them to revise. Please return them the same day.' Reasoning: it names the feeling, the specific behaviour and the request, so it protects both the relationship and the notes.
Traps
- Calling an aggressive reply assertive just because it is honest.
- Listing the 7 Cs but leaving feedback out of the communication cycle.
- Treating listening as silence while the other person speaks.