SPOKEN LANGUAGE AND BODY LANGUAGE

 From Sampath’s Desk:

SPOKEN LANGUAGE AND BODY LANGUAGE

 

A personal conversation is not necessarily formal one in which one can speak a slang or language that doesn’t strictly adhere to structural or grammatical perfection. There you can use words not even generally done in formal contexts or elevated language. In short, we converse in informal vocabulary. You can re-think, re-phrase and re-present your ideas in a personal talk. Interventions, interruptions, repetitions, overlapping, incomplete/loose expressions, corrections, arguments, and even a slip of the tongue are common in a chat. Language could also be dynamic, transient, spontaneous and/or flowing. While perfection is sine qua non in a public-speak or formal speech/lecture, the same is not essentially so in a personal conversation where you have flexibilities. 

 

Face is the index of mind. If you tell a lie or fake attention, discerning mind can catch the botch! Body language is complementary to spoken language enhancing and enriching the effectiveness of the communication. A good public speaker should take care of sequential, chronological and contextual aspects and order.

 

On a lighter vein, at times a well-timed silence can also be an effective elocution and commanding expression. Rarely, while speech is silver, silence is golden.

 

Needless to say, spoken language and body language should be in a perfect harmony and sync with each other. Of course, at times, the two may not match i.e. when you are in conversation with another who you think is boring or beating about the bushes, you may become impatient and fake attention.

 

One of my friends, a chatter box and loquacious to the hilt, would not allow me to speak doing most of the talking himself. Even if I intervened (albeit in vain) to drive home my point of view, he would outshout silencing and shutting me into a ‘cul-de-sac’.

 

Often what you say makes less of an impact than how you act. Your body movement, effective gestures, facial expressions, oscillations and/or modulations in voice, and appropriate postures and pauses send out a message perfect enough to be understood in proper context and perspective by the audience! In public speaking, your body language can make or break your presentation. Audience decides within seconds if they trust the speaker on stage evaluating how the speaker presents himself/herself. If you bungle even slightly, they may not trust you in which case nothing works. It is the presentation that makes a listener edgy, fudgy or tetchy and what not!

 

Body language is part and art of non-verbal communication. While body language shows your confidence, right attitude on stage gives you an air of ability, authority, adjustment and ambience supporting your viewpoints.

 

Body language simpliciter also may not cut the ice unless followed by matching narrations and/or explanations. I had attended many training courses on ‘Effective Communication’. Once the source person had a unique way of proving how body or sign language alone used to communicate something could dilute the matter conveyed when it is passed on through that mode from one to another up to the tail-end person. He proved the point thus - initially, he verbally disseminated a message to only one person (from a target group of 30) in his room with a board displaying 4 or 5 objects thereon in the background aiding him while explaining, as the rest 29 waited outside. The first person was asked to convey the message only by way of sign/body language or dumb-charade avoiding verbal expression to the second person who in turn had to do the same to the next person. After all the turns were over, the 30^th person was asked to verbally explain what the message was? But alas, it was totally twisted and distorted out of context. This underscores the necessity for synchronization of spoken language with body language for clearer dissemination of messages. Body language is an efficient and excellent worker under its master viz. verbal communication, but a fiasco or ‘faux pas’ while standing alone or when ploughing a lonely furrow!

 

Sometimes, people may not even remember the exact words you had said, but they would doubtlessly remember how you made them feel. For, language is leadership at first sight. Let not your body language betray the confidence and sincerity of your words. When the eyes say one thing and the tongue another, it will be disastrous. Even your own eyes may contradict your words as much as words contradict your thoughts and feelings. After all, posture is a leadership language.

 

In the journalistic parlance, ‘Crowd stoned’ means the 'crowd has been/was stoned'. But there is also another meaning ‘crowd stoned others’. The same is so with the headline ‘X killed’. Isn’t? Contextual juxtaposition is important and rather indispensable.

 

R.SAMPATH

26/3/2020