Having a clear understanding of a speaker’s message allows a listener to evaluate that message without getting bogged down in ambiguities or spending unnecessary time and energy addressing points that may be tangential or otherwise nonessential. While we can, and sometimes do, form opinions of information and ideas that we don’t fully understand-or even that we misunderstand-doing so is not often ideal in the long run. The evaluating stage occurs most effectively once the listener fully understands what the speaker is trying to say. A voter who listens to and understands the points made in a political candidate’s stump speech can decide whether or not those points were convincing enough to earn their vote. For example, a listener may determine that a coworker’s forgetting to clean off their table is factually correct, but may also understand that the co-worker’s child is sick and that may be putting them on edge. This may involve considerations of a speaker’s personal or professional motivations and goals. They also ascertain how and why the speaker has come up with and conveyed the message that they delivered. Evaluatingĭuring the evaluating stage, the listener determines whether or not the information they heard and understood from the speaker is well constructed or disorganized, biased or unbiased, true or false, significant or insignificant. Asking questions allows you as the listener to fill in any holes you may have in the mental reconstruction of the speaker’s message. One tactic for better understanding a speaker’s meaning is to ask questions. In the Writing Center, you and your writer may have trouble understanding each other if you have different accents, if the writer is struggling with language fluency, or if the space is very noisy. This, in turn, is essential to understanding a speaker’s message.īefore getting the big picture of a message, it can be difficult to focus on what the speaker is saying. Determining the context and meaning of individual words, as well as assigning meaning in language, is essential to understanding sentences. This is the stage during which the listener determines the context and meanings of the words he or she hears. Understanding or comprehension is “shared meaning between parties in a communication transaction” and constitutes the first step in the listening process. The second stage in the listening process is the understanding stage. Listening is an active process that constructs meaning from both verbal and nonverbal messages. The sounds we hear have no meaning until we give them their meaning in context. Attending is the process of accurately identifying and interpreting particular sounds we hear as words. Paired with hearing, attending is the other half of the receiving stage in the listening process. Basically, an effective listener must hear and identify the speech sounds directed toward them, understand the message of those sounds, critically evaluate or assess that message, remember what’s been said, and respond (either verbally or nonverbally) to information they’ve received. Effectively engaging with all five stages of the listening process lets us best gather the information we need from others. The listening process involves four stages: receiving, understanding, evaluating, and responding. Listening to your writers and your coworkers is vital to maintaining good conversation and avoiding misunderstandings that might lead to unnecessary conflict. Most of what we do in the Writing Center is listen, but there’s a difference between hearing and understanding the words someone is saying and listening to their message.
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