Through a summer class in Advanced Communication Skills—one the teacher said would be more aptly named “Basic Communication Skills”—I put a finger on the rapid, simultaneous transaction they call communication. The course essentially taught students how people communicate and deal with problems and how to communicate more effectively—seemingly elementary concepts.

Perhaps the fact that I find communication of almost any kind a simple task clouds my judgment, but there should not be a college level class on how to communicate.

Communicating is an excessively necessary tool learned somewhere in very early childhood. By the age of 20 or so, most everyone should have it down pat. I shudder to think of the consequences otherwise; and yet, there I was. A class surely would not stand if somewhere along the line someone hadn’t notice a need to define or reinforce a concept, certainly not in this case.

This chain of thought then leads to only one conclusion: a great number of the current, traditional college student body must not be effective communicators.

My experiences have yet to prove the conclusion negative, granted exceptions to the rule do exist.

Though many explanations come to mind, the most boggling suggests that the future breadwinners of the United States learned poor communication skills from the current breadwinners. Despite the virtual whirlwind of communication going on around every average American, the future breadwinners of the United States simply haven’t been taught to voice and expand upon their thoughts to the satisfaction of scholars—hence the course in Advanced Communications Skills.

Saying students are ill-equipped communication wise is not an inference that their teachers are equally debilitated; no evidence supports such a claim. Rather, a sort of generation gap occurred in which said skills were overlooked as palpable.

This oversight exists as only a fragment in the inter-generational gaps. For decades Americans have laughed at the family-center sitcoms on television detailing the misunderstandings between parents and their young that ring so true—All in the Family, Family Ties and George Lopez, to name a few.

Personally, my mother once called me a “skank,” believing the term to mean dirty person, not knowing the current definition to be “loose,” if you will.

All comedy aside, one noted generation gap goes hand in hand with communication: the younger generation finds it less offensive to discuss certain topics in public than do their predecessors. What parents and grandparents find crude or distasteful more often than not slides right off their children and grandchildren’s backs; where they choose to keep certain things hush, their spawn choose to speak.

The conclusion to these generation gaps is simply put: My generation may stereotypically form inadequate sentences, but at least we voice them.

• Facebook Comments
• Site Comments

1 comments

reader

Thu Oct 15 2009 12:35

This is crazy. Nothing in this badly conceived column holds together. The writer is a bromide and a pedant who needs to realize that if one doesn't have anything interesting to say, one shouldn't write a newspaper column.

Add comment


I am not posting spam. I understand posting spam or other comments that are unrelated to this article will cause my comment to be flagged for deletion and possibly cause my IP address to be permanently banned from this server.

Enter the characters in the image above:

log out