Across the internet, you can find this phrase, “punctuation saves lives.” It’s like a headline in a newspaper, but when you read the examples below, it is so true; just shifting the comma from here to here completely changes the meaning of a sentence. And for our younger generation, it’s as if they don’t even care about that, because I don’t think they use punctuation at all.
It’s crazy to read the text exchange between my teenagers and their friends. It’s like one run-on sentence, forever. But this is because we think that communication is just about words. In fact, seeing even more and more use of AI to write for us indicates that communication is just about the words. And we know that’s a myth.
Communication is NOT just about the words.
Now look, it can be about the actual punctuation, but let’s go a step further. Communication is also about the emotion and the feeling that it conveys. When you think about an email, even when you think, “Oh, this email, it just needs to be grammatically written well, maybe I’ll use AI for some creativity. Punctuation’s going to be spot on because I’m using artificial intelligence.”
But, where’s the feeling? Where’s the emotion? Where is your personality within that email communication? And now, let’s go beyond the written word. Let’s go to when we are communicating via video or face-to-face in person, where somebody can actually see you. We absolutely know that that nonverbal communication is exponentially more important than the actual words.
How we use our body language, how we don’t use our body language, our facial expressions, the tone in our voice, the volume, the pace, the speed. All of it is a communication package. And that package is what gets your message across – your intended message, to actually create the outcome that you want.
So the myth that communication is all about words needs to be debunked, because it is not. We need to create that entire communication package that really gets to the meaning and the message and the delivery, and where you want to move people.
Take a look and evaluate your current communication package today. What does that look like? And what’s maybe one area out of that package that you want to focus on in the coming weeks?