COM 321_Rivera-Williams_Wk 5 Final paper

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Apr 3, 2024

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Running head: IMPORTANCE OF COMMUNICATION 1 IMPORTANCE OF COMMUNICATION By: Frances Rivera-Williams COM 321: Communication Theory Duvan Arsola, Professor June 5, 2016

IMPORTANCE OF COMMUNICATION 2 Every man, woman, and child learns to communicate at an early age. We never once think about how important communication is to our everyday lives. To be successful, in every aspect of our lives, we must learn the history behind communication. As you continue to read this essay, it is going to give you an understanding of how studying communication in the areas of interpersonal, group, and organizational communication is important and how it can help you get a better understanding of what it means to be an effective communicator. Let’s begin by first getting a lesson on the history of communication. In ancient times, the study of language was known as rhetoric. In order to learn, you would have to find a teacher that was known as rhetoricians. 3oo years before the birth of Christ, In Athens, Greece, communication was as popular a subject as it is today. (Trenholm, 2013, pg. 3. Para 1) In those days, it was common for people to do a lot of public speaking and lectures. Not like in today’s society, where communication has fallen to the wayside with the creation of the internet and modern technology. In olden times, it was important to be able to express yourself with good communication skills. It showed that you were intelligent and thus made a person more favored for higher positions. In classical times, before Aristotle, two Sicilian Greeks, Corax and Tisias believed that the study of communication was prompted by practical problems. (Thonssen, Baird, & Braden, 1970). In other words, they felt that people who could not organize their thoughts properly could not put up an effective argument. In lieu of this problem, teachers known as Sophists. Sophists “were professional speech teachers who advertised their services by posting notices in public places where they could find an audience.” (Trenholm, 2013, pg. 5. Para 4) Sophists wanted the public people to be able to use the persuasive speaking to make their points. This bothered philosophers, Aristotle and Plato because they believed that

IMPORTANCE OF COMMUNICATION 3 communication was the key to finding truth in what is said, and also it was more important than just winning an argument. (Trenholm, 2013). If you think of communication styles from those days and compare it to the communication of today, you can see the importance of how far communication has come. Before I began studying communication, I never once thought of the importance of what was being communicated every day because I just thought it was normal. It was not until I learned that interpersonal communication is much more. Interpersonal communication is communication that we have on a daily basis. It is interpersonal because it is face to face communication. It is like telling your friend a funny story, to responding to a discussion post in your college or university classes. I never understood that when we communicate that there are three sets of rules that we must follow to make our communication interpersonal, 1. Cultural-level rules are general and apply to all of the members of a particular culture. 2. Sociological-level rules, rules that are tied to group membership. And 3. psychological-level rules. Cultural-level rules are reserved for people we do not know. For example, when we meet a stranger, we do not walk up to them and hug them. Instead, we shake their hands or we say things like “Nice to meet you”. With Sociological-level rules it shows our interaction between people who relate to the same group. For instance, the interaction between two athletes, where the interaction does not need to be as formal as with the cultural rules. Lastly, we have the Psychological-level rules. These rules are not important because we make them up as we go

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