Page 110 - Essentials of Human Communication

Principles for Using Verbal Messages Effectively 89

you treat your little sister as if she were 10 years old, or do you treat her like the 20-year-old
woman she has become? Your evaluations of yourself and others need to keep pace with
the rapidly changing real world. Otherwise you’ll be left with attitudes and beliefs—static
evaluations—about a world that no longer exists.
To guard against static evaluation, use a device called the date, a mental subscript that
enables you to look at your statement in the context of time. Dating your statement is espe-
cially important when your statements are evaluative. Remember that Gerry Smith 2002 is not
Gerry Smith 2010 , that academic abilities 2006 are not academic abilities 2010 .
At the same time, recognize that each of these six guidelines can be used to deceive you.
For example, when people treat individuals as they’re labeled or influence you to respond to
people in terms of their labels (often racist, sexist, or homophobic), they are using intensional
orientation unethically. Similarly, when people present themselves as knowing everything
about something (gossip is often a good example), they are exploiting the natural tendency
for people to think in allness terms to achieve their own ends. When people present infer-
ences as if they are facts (again, gossip provides a good example) to secure your belief or
when they stereotype, they are relying on your tendency to confuse facts and inferences and
to fail to discriminate. And, when people talk in terms of opposites (polarize) or as if things
and people don’t change (static evaluation) in order to influence you, they are again assum-
ing you won’t talk about the middle ground or ask for updated information.

Objectives self-Check
● Can you explain the six ways in which language can distort thinking (intensional orientation, allness,
the distinction between facts and inferences, indiscrimination, polarization, and static evaluation)?
● Can you use verbal messages that avoid such misevaluations?
● Can you identify these misevaluations in the messages of others?

Messages in the Media Wrap Up
Television sitcoms provide great examples of effective as well as ineffective use of language. As you watch a
sitcom, focus on the language used by different characters. and ask yourself how the choices they made could
have been more effective?

Summary of Concepts and Skills Study and Review materials for this chapter
are at MyCommunicationLab

Listen to the Audio Chapter Summary Principles of verbal Messages
at MyCommunicationLab
Focusing on verbal messages, this chapter first looked at the 2. Message meanings are in people.
nature of language and identified several major ways in 3. Messages are denotative (i.e., objective and generally easily
which language works. The next section examined disconfir- agreed on) and connotative (i.e., subjective and generally
mation and confirmation and the related topics of racist, highly individual in meaning).
heterosexist, ageist, and sexist speech. The final section 4. Messages vary in abstraction; they can range from
presented ways to make verbal communication more accu- extremely general to extremely specific.
rate and effective. 5. Messages can deceive.
1. Communication is a package of verbal and nonverbal signals. 6. Messages vary in politeness.