Although it takes time, you can learn to recognize your communication tendencies and adjust your patterns. Assertive communication fosters an environment that allows both the speaker and listener to express themselves openly and respectfully. It requires being open, honest, and direct — but not aggressive. Assertiveness helps get your message across in a palatable way, without attacking or disregarding your conversation partner.
It also helps to know the different communication styles so you can recognize when someone uses them. Understanding the patterns enables you to decode what people mean, and decide how to best respond.
I sensed that something might be wrong. I frequently play a game with business clients to illustrate the limitations of language. After 18 years of using this exercise, not once have two people come up with the very same image.
We use words all the time to describe abstract, intangible things. We ascribe meaning to the words, the sequence, and the timing to describe what stirs within us. But our inner processings, feelings, thoughts, perceptions, attitudes, and so much more remain invisible.
This is why it becomes so important to know ourselves first before we can express what we think and feel to others. Fortunately, self-assessment tools and personality indicators like the DISC profile or emotional unavailability chart can help you better understand yourself.
The first distinction to make when determining your communication style starts with how you make decisions. The DISC profile provides an unbiased personality assessment tool that outlines human behavioral patterns.
Over two million people have taken this communication style quiz. For influencing: A complete communication process is necessary in influencing others or being influenced. The individual having potential to influence others can easily persuade others. It implies the provision of feedback which tells the effect of communication.
For image building: A business enterprise cannot isolate from the rest of the society. There is interrelationship and interdependence between the society and an enterprise operating in the society. Goodwill and confidence are necessarily created among the public.
Through an effective external communication system, an enterprise has to inform the society about its goals, activities, progress and social responsibility. For employees orientation: When a new employee enter into the organization at that time he or she will be unknown to the organization programs, policies, culture etc. Communication helps to make people acquainted with the co-employees, superior and with the policies, objectives, rules and regulations of the organization.
Other: Effective decision-making is possible when required and adequate information is supplied to the decision-maker. Effective communication helps the process of decision- making. In general, everyone in the organization has to provide with necessary information so as to enable to discharge tasks effectively and efficiently. These four components are essential for communication. The process of communication begins when one person the sender wants to transmit a fact, idea, opinion or other information to someone else the receiver.
This facts, idea or opinion has meaning to the sender. The next step is translating or converting the message into a language which reflects the idea. That is the message must be encoded. The encoding process is influenced by content of the message, the familiarity of sender and receiver and other situation of factors. After the message has been encoded, it is transmitted through the appropriate channel or medium.
Common channel in organization includes meetings, reports, memorandums, letters, e-mail, fax and telephone calls. When the message is received, it is decoded, by the receiver and gives feedback to the sender as the conformation about the particular message has been carefully understand or not.
Sender or transmitter: The person who desires to convey the message is known as sender. Sender initiates the message and changes the behaviour of the receiver. Message: It is a subject matter of any communication.
It may involve any fact, idea, opinion or information. It must exist in the mind of the sender if communication is to take place. Encoding: The communicator of the information organises his idea into series of symbols words, signs, etc. Communication channel: The sender has to select the channel for sending the information.
Communication channel is the media through which the message passes. However, I would prefer questions about the chapter at the end of the entire chapter or at the end of each section in addition to the objectives, takeaways and exercises. Thus, I am giving 4 stars for outdated examples. I agree with another reviewer that the examples are a bit dated which quickly happens in a mass communication textbook.
This affects the credibility of the overall text. For example, in Chapter This is The textbook is written in clear and easily understood language. It is accessible and comprehensible. It would be nice to have a glossary for students for the mass communication jargon. The text seems to be consistent with terminology and framework. However, the textbook seems dated overall and new terminology and frameworks could be added to make it more relevant and interesting for students.
The modularity of the textbook is good. It is easily and readily divisible into smaller reading sections that can be assigned different points within the course.
I like the division of the chapters into subsections. However, I agree with another reviewer that the textbook is too lengthy. In my opinion, pages is too long.
Although I have used other textbooks of similar length, there are many more vivid visuals for students and more timely information and examples.
Thank you for this opportunity. I like the idea of an open textbook and would be interested in doing more reviews in the future. The book is comprehensive, covering the study of media and its intersection with culture, through an in-depth look at each of the major mediums, then content considerations, economics and ethics issues related to the mass media.
This text seems accurate. I didn't find glaring errors of fact in my reading. Though, as I will mention later in my review, many of the examples used in the text are now several years outdated, when more recent examples or case studies would be more relatable to a youthful college audience.
This is one area where I find some difficulty with the book -- as is the case with every text of this type. The world of media is ever-changing and fast-changing. The historical information about the invention, early adoption, and improvements to the mediums of mass communication books, newspapers, radio, television, etc. A few of the examples and case studies used to describe events related to the media feel outdated.
Examples from and , are not relative to college freshmen in who were in middle-school and probably not paying attention when these things happened. Therefore, the longevity of this text is limited, unless it is updated-revised at least every third year. The author's writing style is informative and engaging. While the writing is clear and understandable, the chapters often get too deep and try to cover anything and everything in a particular content area-- or sub-chapter, when a couple statements and one case study would suffice.
I found the chapter formatting, writing style and narrative flow to be consistent from chapter to chapter. Here, the text shines. First, it is broken into chapters that are easily identifiable and segment the content nicely. Within each chapter are several sub-chapters that allow readers to read and absorb material in smaller chunks. This will be helpful to the learning styles of younger people today.
For the most part, I agree with the author's organization and flow. My only thought, and it's just an opinion, is: Chapter 2 on Media Effects should be moved to Chapter 14, so it comes after the major media categories and then the economics of the media, and just before the ethics and law of media.
To be fair, most mass media textbooks follow this same organization. When I teach the class, I always move the "effects" chapter to later in the semester, after I've discussed the media types, their history and development. A second thought, I'd hold the footnoted source credits to the end of each chapter, or preferably to the end of the book.
The sometimes very long list of footnoted sources between each sub-chapter stops the flow for readers that may wish to read a full chapter. I downloaded the PDF version, and read that.
I found the interface cumbersome. I wish paragraphs were indented. I wish it was easier to navigate from chapter to chapter or topic to topic without scrolling, scrolling, scrolling.
I wish there was an easy way to get to a Table of Contents with one click, and then from there click topic-anchored reference points to skip to specific information sought. I wish it had an index that had anchor links. I realize this would be a large undertaking to create and connect the links. But that would make searching and finding specific information easy and fast.
If I was a college student studying for a chapter quiz or exam on the foundations of radio, I might like to scoot to the Index and click on Radio-Invention, or on Marconi and be led instantly to that content within the text.
And, probably an easy fix, I wish it was more evenly spaced. In my opinion, there should consistently be two spaces between sub-headed sections or sub-chapters.
In most places in this text, a new, bolded subhead appears on the very next line under its preceding paragraph. This looks jammed and messy. I have no problem with the grammar. It's clear, easy to follow, and written to be accessible to a college audience. I used the Gunning Fog Index to test several paragraphs throughout the text and found some of the writing aimed at an audience with years of formal education, and in a few cases more than 15 years of education.
The average of my selected readings came out at years of education -- perfectly appropriate for a freshmen-level college course. Other than my hope for some more recent case studies and examples, I find the text to be culturally relevant.
A few of the examples mention MySpace, Napster and Kazaa as internet entities with which the audience should be familiar. In reality, today's college freshmen know almost nothing of these three internet terms. In my current Media and Society class, less than ten percent of the class had ever had a MySpace account. They had heard of MySpace, but really knew nothing. No one in the class knew about Napster or Kazaa first-hand This text feels too long.
This is a difficult thing. The author includes everything he feels needs to be discussed in each chapter. But it's too much for a college freshman-level class. Example: The chapter on Music is more than 50 pages long. While I agree college students should be able to read this much each week for a class, I'm confident they will not read this much. I believe the text could be condensed quite a bit while maintaining the content necessary to make it meaningful at the freshman level.
It's a complete text, and would make a nice reference tool -- with better indexing and searching links within the body -- but it won't work at an entry level to the study of media. At my university, the "Media and Society" class is a level course, used as a general education class that can fulfill a categorical credit-need for all students, not just Mass Communication majors. And we consider the class a "feeder" to the major, introducing students to the study of media and hopefully igniting an interest in students to consider a career in media, and therefore declare a Mass Communication major.
This book, with its depth, might be more appropriate in an upper-vision media studies course. The text is a broad and comprehensive overview of all relevant forms of media today.
Although this is a common organizational approach for survey textbooks of media, this particular volume utilizes it in a particularly clear and cogent manner. Content is accurate and strikes appropriately diplomatic tones where contentious issues might arise that concern social and cultural power. The text is quite relevant for the most part, but by the very nature of its subject matter will undoubtedly require updates every few years.
Framing the intro of the "Future of Mass Media" chapter with a specific device--the iPad--rather than the set of cultural protocols such devices foster, for example, might prove to be one area where instructors redirect conversations after the next new device inevitably cycles through. The text is lucid and easy to follow. The book is ideal for introductory-level courses, but is likely too survey-oriented for courses beyond that level. Here the book really excels at guiding students through a programmatic approach to studying media.
The book flows logically. Some medium-specific chapters might arguably be collapsed into others, but their separation provides instructors with a good range of options for organizing lesson plans as they wish rather than having to proceed sequentially. The text is a cleanly organized PDF, but is quite cumbersome to navigate internally.
The book appropriately qualifies and focuses on the US media context, drawing on a good diversity of examples throughout.
This book devotes almost pages to achieving an impressive level of comprehensiveness, considering the vast subject material upon which it focuses. This book manages to cover that remarkable series of media developments, and actually a good bit more, while keeping it all in broader context and without getting bogged down in the tedium of too much minutia from any one topic area. The author of any text on this subject is faced with the challenge of achieving up-to-date content on a subject that explodes with new developments faster than any static text could ever stay fully up to date on for long.
This text addresses that challenge by focusing on presenting a fully, dynamic framework that is so fully developed that it provides readers with a quite useful and enduring framework for considering crucial issues of media and culture in a manner that should give it a considerable shelf life.
The text breaks down relevant concepts and terminology with lucid, accessible prose so that even readers at the most introductory level should be able to always understand the discussion.
Throughout the text, it very clearly helps readers think about each concept and related elements very clearly and in context that illuminates their significance. The author clearly has an instinctive, unified understanding of the essential dynamics driving the media world as it has evolved, exists today, and is unfolding going forward, and consistently discusses all topics in a context that never loses connection with that broad, fluid picture.
Chapters are organized into small modules, short subsections that by and large can stand alone and could be reorganized as an instructor might find more useful for the purposes of particular courses. Each chapter and each subsection includes highly useful learning objectives, key takeaways, and exercises, links to source materials and end-of-chapter assessments.
The book begins with a thorough overview that takes the reader quickly through a multifaceted assessment of the relationship between media and culture. With that foundation established, it moves into discussion of what is understood about the complex subject of media effects. Then it moves into narrower topics within the broader view considered so far, moving on to discussions of books, newspapers, magazines, music, radio, movies, and television, and then on to more recent developments such as electronic games, the Internet and social media.
The final chapter very effectively brings together the many strands of discussion from preceding chapters and synergizes them with a forward looking discussion of what the media future may hold.
A table of contents within the book pdf itself would be helpful, as would content outlines at the beginning of each chapter. There do not seem to be any interface problems. Display features are presented quite distinctly and effectively throughout and should present readers with not distractions or confusion. The layout is somewhat visually plain, compared to many websites and even many traditional textbooks with more graphically elaborate designs, but the simple layout is easy to negotiate.
It even includes an explanation of why it is incorrect to make that term singular, despite its popular usage in such manner. The text is very well written throughout, lively and to the point, with an easy flow that should enable readers to move through it almost effortlessly. Over the course of this page book, the reader is taken through an extensive range of discussion examples that span a multitude of races, ethnicities, and backgrounds.
This reviewer did not detect any instances of cultural insensitivity or offensiveness. This book is written well enough to be of general interest as a stand-alone read, apart from the context of its use as a textbook. The text covers all of the major forms of media and significant related topics advertising, media economics, ethics, etc.
While the text lacks a dedicated chapter for journalism, this topic is covered at length in some of the other chapters. No glossary or index is provided. Content is accurate and free of glaring errors. Although written in a personal, conversational tone, the text avoids obvious personal bias.
The content is up-to-date, including discussion of social media and references to recent works of media criticism. The rapid development of new media makes it likely that some of the material in this or any book will quickly seem dated, but the most time-sensitive material is confined to a few chapters, which should facilitate future updates. The book is written in clear, easy-to-understand language that should appeal to today's college-age reader. The text shows good consistency, introducing key ideas early and using them to facilitate understanding of material covered in subsequent chapters.
The chapters are clearly divided into subsections, each with clearly stated learning objectives, key takeaways and learning exercises. Most subsections could stand on their own, and chapters focusing on specific forms of mass media could easily be rearranged or skipped if desired.
The topics are presented in a logical fashion. After introducing basic ideas about media and culture and media effects, the text moves to discussion of various forms of media in chronological orders, and ends with chapters on various mass media applications and issues, such as advertising, public relations, ethics and government regulation. The text is a basic PDF, with fixed line breaks that limit display options. Most URLs are live links.
Footnote numbers and references to chapter sections look like links but are not, which may confuse some readers. A format better-suited for e-readers would be welcome.
The text strives to be culturally neutral, and should not offend any particular group of readers. The text clearly focuses on the U. This is an impressively comprehensive overview of mass communication, written in a clear and engaging manner. Discussion questions and exercises are helpful resources for classroom use.
A glossary, index and more flexible e-format would make this text even more useful. This text is a welcome addition to the field, and will serve students and teachers well. According to the author, the world did not need another introductory text in mass communication. But the world did need another kind of introductory text in mass communication, and that is how Understanding Media and Culture: An Introduction to Mass Communication was birthed.
The only question was: What would be the purpose of another introductory mass communication text? Understanding Media and Culture: An Introduction to Mass Communication was written to squarely emphasize media technology. Today's students are immersed in media technology. They live in a world of cell phones, smart phones, video games, iPods, laptops, Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, and more. They fully expect that new technology will be developed tomorrow.
Yet students often lack an historical perspective on media technology. They lack knowledge of the social, political and economic forces that shape media technology. This is not knowledge for knowledge's sake. It is knowledge that can help them understand, comprehend, appreciate, anticipate, shape and control media technology. With this focus, Understanding Media and Culture becomes an appropriate title. Indeed, the title has particular significance.
Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media is a key text in media studies. Written in the s, Understanding Media was the subject of intense debates that continue to this day. Its central message was that the technology of media — not their content — was their most important feature. In a typically pithy phrase, McLuhan said, "The medium is the message. The goal is to adopt a textbook that will support and complement your teaching of this course. Understanding Media and Culture: An Introduction to Mass Communication will support an engaging and interesting course experience for students that will not only show them the powerful social, political and economic forces will affect the future of media technology, but will challenge students to do their part in shaping that future.
Content Accuracy rating: 3 The content is error-free. Clarity rating: 5 The text is clear and easy to follow. Consistency rating: 4 The text is consistent in its use of terms and its framework. Modularity rating: 5 The text's modularity is useful. Interface rating: 5 No issues with interface noted. Grammatical Errors rating: 4 No glaring grammatical issues noted.
Cultural Relevance rating: 2 There is not much focus on the significance of culture. Comments The book provides an understanding of mass communication that would be easy for undergraduate college students to follow. Content Accuracy rating: 5 The content is well-sourced throughout with a list of references at the end of each chapter. Clarity rating: 5 All information is presented in a way that is very clear with explanations and examples when further clarification is needed.
Consistency rating: 5 For a book covering as many different topics as it does, the overall structure and framework of this textbook is great. Modularity rating: 5 Chapters are broken down into smaller sub-chapters, each with their own sub-headings hyperlinked in the Table of Contents. Interface rating: 4 As mentioned above, hyperlinks--including in the Table of Contents and references--are all functional.
Grammatical Errors rating: 5 No grammatical errors that immediately jumped out. Overall seems clear and well-written. Cultural Relevance rating: 4 The text provides lots of examples, though most do come from US media. Comments Overall, a solid introductory textbook that covers a wide range of topics relevant to mass communications, media, and culture. Content Accuracy rating: 5 Its content is accurate and unbiased.
Clarity rating: 5 It is written with clear, straight-forward language well-suited an introductory textbook. Consistency rating: 5 The book is consistent in terms of terminologies and its historical approach to media growth and transformation.
Modularity rating: 5 Each chapter is divided in sections, and sections in turn have various reading modules with different themes. Interface rating: 5 The textbook does not have significant interface issues.
Grammatical Errors rating: 5 There are no grammatical errors. Cultural Relevance rating: 4 The textbook has a number of examples of minority cultures and ethnicities. Comments All considered, this is a very good textbook to be used in an introductory course. Content Accuracy rating: 5 Accurate, up to date information on history, concepts, and theories.
Clarity rating: 5 Clear, easy to read text that would benefit introductory students of mass comm. Consistency rating: 5 Introduces terms and concepts and then utilizes them throughout. Modularity rating: 5 The separation of the larger text into smaller sections is incredibly helpful and makes reading and assignments of readings easy, leading also to the ability to separate into sections that would be appropriate for any course organization.
Interface rating: 5 Navigation works, images clear and detailed. Grammatical Errors rating: 5 No glaring grammatical errors. Cultural Relevance rating: 4 The examples and images demonstrate diversity in race and also provides examples outside of the United States, which is important. Comments This is an excellent and comprehensive text for intro students that includes important historical moments and thorough coverage of main concepts and theories in the field, with a diverse set of moments and examples.
Content Accuracy rating: 5 The text contains accurate research with clearly-cited references that give credibility to the content. Clarity rating: 5 The text is professional and well-written. It is well-suited to a college reading level. Consistency rating: 5 The chapter format, writing style, and overall presentation of information are consistent throughout the text. Modularity rating: 5 The text is divided into clear chapters focusing on one medium at a time, much like other publisher texts for mass communication.
Interface rating: 4 I didn't find any problems with the interface as it is a standard text that can be viewed as a PDF, but an index would really help navigation. Grammatical Errors rating: 5 Professional, well-written text with no errors.
Cultural Relevance rating: 5 I don't believe readers will find any of the text culturally insensitive or offensive. Comments This textbook is very comprehensive and will work well for an introductory course.
Clarity rating: 5 The style of this text is straightforward and scholarly. Consistency rating: 5 Like Pavlik and McIntosh, this text uses the concept of "convergence" to explain several key phenomena in mass communication. Modularity rating: 4 On one hand, this text rates highly in "modularity," because I could imagine myself breaking its chapters apart and re-arranging them in a different order than they are presented here.
Interface rating: 5 I did not encounter any problems with interface. Grammatical Errors rating: 5 The writing style is professional and free of errors. Cultural Relevance rating: 4 This is a genuine concern for mass media texts. Comments I have been using the same text for seven years Pavlik and McIntosh. Content Accuracy rating: 4 While the information was accurate and the discussions on key issues were supported by good references, it was odd to see the questionable formatting and quality of the first reference on page 3: Barnum, P.
Consistency rating: 5 The framework and terminology are consistent throughout the book. Modularity rating: 4 Each chapter can be assigned to students as a stand-along reading, and can be used to realign with other subunits should an instructor decide to compile reading within this book or from different sources.
Interface rating: 5 I downloaded the book as a PDF and had no problem to search or navigate within the file. Grammatical Errors rating: 4 I spotted a few minor formatting or punctuation issues such as the missing quotation marks stated earlier, but no glaring errors as far as I know.
Cultural Relevance rating: 5 While it mainly focuses on American media and culture, this book contains statistics and cases from many countries e. Comments Overall, this is a high-quality textbook and it contains almost all the key issues in today's media studies in spite of the somewhat outdated data and statistics.
Content Accuracy rating: 5 This book was written in a very unbiased manner. Clarity rating: 5 Terminology is clearly defined, and students have little trouble finding definitions in the glossary.
Consistency rating: 3 As previously mentioned, the biggest struggle I've had with this text is the fact that the latter third was not written to the same quality of the first ten chapters. Modularity rating: 5 The modularity was the biggest selling point for me with this text. Interface rating: 4 This text is available in. Grammatical Errors rating: 5 The text contained no grammatical errors that I noticed in the latest edition, a tremendous improvement from the first semester I used this text.
Cultural Relevance rating: 5 I did not find the content to be culturally insensitive or offensive in any way. Comments This is a fantastic text. Clarity rating: 5 The book is fairly fast-paced and easy enough to follow for lower level or beginner students.
Modularity rating: 5 The text can easily be used as formatted, or broken up into sections and moved around. Interface rating: 5 The book is easy to navigate with had no issues viewing the photos or charts.
Grammatical Errors rating: 5 The book is well written and free of any gratuitous errors. Cultural Relevance rating: 2 The book does a good job of focusing on US media and society. Comments Overall the book does a great job with the history of mass communication and society.
Content Accuracy rating: 4 The book appears to be objective and adopts a critical but non-partisan perspective. Consistency rating: 5 The framework and the terminology are consistent.
Interface rating: 5 : The text does not have any interface issues, as it is easy to navigate, all illustrations, charts, and other visuals are clear and distortion-free. Grammatical Errors rating: 5 The book is grammatically accurate and error-free. These fundamental differences touch also the way in which the field of communication treats verbal communica- tion and relates or fails to relate to the language sciences proper. Let us start from what could be, prima facie, a plausible label to denote the matter of the present book as a relevant subfield of Communication: speech com- munication.
In a North American context, the speech label refers more to an intellectual tradition within the communication discipline than to any topical subfield having to do with verbal communication. In the early years of the 20 th Century teachers of public speaking in American universities broke away from English departments and founded de- partments of Speech, later to become departments of Speech Communication.
Ac- cording to Craig — , these departments where often characterized by a tension between scholars of the Humanities rooted in the classical rhetorical tradi- tions and those scholars who saw Speech as a behavioral, social discipline. In contrast with the North American situation, in Europe rhetoric was, until recently, not perceived as a living scholarly and pedagogical discipline and the educational endeavor of public speaking instruction did not have the same impor- tance.
In some European countries, it is linguistics and semiotics, rather than rhe- toric, that have had an impact on the development of the field, after they had become very strong disciplines under the influence of structuralism.
If rhetoric deserves to be studied, it is merely as a historical subject — as history of rhetoric — to critically understand the roots of these phenomena with the help of newer sciences such as linguistics, semiotics, psycho-analysis and marxism cf. Barthes Nonetheless, Perelman and Ol- brechts-Tyteca and Barthes share an important presupposition: they both believed that, at the time of their writing, rhetoric as a discipline was dead. What is then the place of verbal communi- cation in European communication sciences?
The current configuration of communication education in France, as Krieg- Planque — observes, features curricula that mix language sciences and communication sciences and includes a certain number of discourse-related or semiotics-related courses also in more standard communication curricula. The relationship of these courses with a broader, encompassing, approach to verbal communication is far from being straightforward, however.
Although the view of discourse analysis as method is also typical of the Ameri- can communication scene Tracy , its confusion with quantitative methods of mass communication research is impossible in an American context. In that con- 1 The shift in the denomination of the field is intentional. While in North America Communication is perceived as being one discipline and is usually not explicitly qualified as a science but rather listed among the arts, despite its strong social sciences component, in continental Europe the field is more often perceived as multi-disciplinary and its component disciplines are often qualified as sciences: hence Communication Sciences.
In contrast, French discourse analysis de- veloped from the study of political discourse, newspaper discourse and media dis- course in general and involved from the beginning computer supported methods for the quantitative analysis of extensive corpora cf. Within the language scien- ces, there was a time in which linguistics, in close alliance with semiotics, enjoyed wide currency within communication sciences, at least as far as Europe is con- cerned, and was regarded as a model for theorizing about communication.
The contribution of linguistic ideas to the field of communication remained however largely programmatic. That period is long past and linguistics and semiotics have since then taken different paths at least until very recently. It has entered a series of interdisciplinary partnerships that have made it much more relevantly connected with the study of communication, while suffering of a lack of visibility in the field of communication. Two trends of research are particularly relevant here and have informed the architecture of the present volume.
They are basically related to the two major trends we mentioned at the beginning of this introduction: research mostly orient- ed towards social aspects, and research mostly oriented towards cognitive aspects.
Although currently the divide between these two trends tends to blur, at least for what concerns their central topics of interest, relevant oppositions in focus do exist at the epistemological level due to a preference for methods and concerns of the social sciences on one side and of the natural sciences on the other. The trend that stems from the interaction of the Language Sciences and social sciences such as anthropology and sociology produced a plethora of approaches to the study of verbal meanings in socially situated communication events discourse analysis, conversation analysis, ethnography of communication, interactional so- ciolinguistics, critical discourse analysis, etc.
The other major trend, represented by cognitively oriented research on lan- guage and verbal communication, is mostly carried out within cognitive and ex- perimental pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, in close connection with research in cognitive psychology, cognitive anthropology, artificial intelli- gence and cognitive science in general.
This growing body of work addresses the cognitive processes underlying verbal communication seeking to factor out what is specific to strictly verbal aspects and dependent on a highly specialized language faculty, from what depends on more general cognitive processes, recruited in com- munication, that also underlie non-verbal behaviour.
On the one hand this kind of research is deeply intertwined with evolutionary research on language and com- munication tackling the question of what is uniquely and distinctively human in human communication and by contrast what we share with other living beings. On the other hand, it provides insight into how language interacts with the reasoning processes involved in inference, argumentation and persuasion as well as with cognitive processes connected with framing, metaphorical mapping and analogy.
The field known as Pragmatics, with its emphasis on intentional communica- tive behaviour, contextual processes of explicit and implicit message understand- ing, shared intentions and action coordination, provides a bridge between the cog- nitive and the social strands of research. Cognitively oriented research on language use, although it is not systematically represented in the discipline of communica- tion as an autonomous concern, is nevertheless relevant or even central to a variety of areas ranging from research about procedures of message understanding to per- suasion research.
As expected from our understanding of the scientific landscape, we took seri- ously the double focus on cognitive and socio-cultural aspects in current research on language. An introduction 11 ing complementarity rather than as a sterile divide, although acknowledging that on some issues the epistemological tension remains.
Among the critical themes that a volume on language within communication sciences has to address, there are the few big issues of what language is, how studying it contributes crucially to the understanding of human communication in general, and what it tells us at a more philosophical and anthropological level about human nature.
It is also impor- tant to consider how language concerns intersect communication research at the level of methodology for the analysis of verbal data of different kinds. As it appears, verbal communication research pragmatics is typically relevant to broader issues of communication sciences; its applicability to the analysis of communication in various social contexts is always in focus throughout the volume.
The book follows these principles along six uneven sections: Verbal communi- cation: fundamentals; Explicit and implicit verbal communication; Conversation and dialogue; Types of discursive activities; Verbal communication across media and con- texts; Verbal communication quality.
The first section of the handbook Verbal communication: Fundamentals is devoted to liminal matters that are actually crucial to acquire a grasp of the speci- ficity of verbal communication and at the same time appreciate its pivotal nature in the human communication landscape at large.
Jointly, the two chapters that compose this section respond to the need of dispelling a double misperception of verbal communication phenomena. On the one hand, the verbal component in communication has often been seen as the default form of human communication. It is the one that is often implied when theorizing about human communication in general and with some triviality.
The question of the uniqueness of human ver- bal communication and of the role of language in what makes us humans requires us to take a closer look at the very emergence of language in light of Evolution. On the other hand, when the attention is brought on means of human commu- nication where the language faculty does not play a role at least, not a directly observable one , the importance of these non-verbal means in our lives and their effectiveness for persuasion, for the maintenance of interpersonal relationships, or for other socially relevant purposes is emphasized at the expense of words, lan- guage or verbal communication.
This attitude, enshrined by the saying a picture is worth a thousand words, appears to be endemic to the media, popular science, self- development literature and consulting on communication skills for professionals.
Nickolaus Jackob, Thomas Roessing and Thomas Petersen observe in their review on the effects of verbal and non-verbal elements in communication that this atti- tude surfaces with a certain regularity also in serious communication research with even some gross misrepresentations of findings.
This phenomenon is interesting because it manifests an underlying view of human communication where verbal and non-verbal semiotic modes are pitted against each other while no emphasis is put on the effects resulting from the integration of these different modes of commu- nication, tackled by the burgeoning research on multimodality reported in section V of this handbook — where it is shown how the use of language in conversational interaction as well as in written documents lives in a close complementary relation with other semiotic modes less directly shaped by the human language faculty.
The second section, Explicit and implicit verbal communication, offers an over- view of the various aspects of meaning that language carries.
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