Communication Styles

Communication styles are different among every race. For example, some say, “Hi.”, with a handshake while others give a head nod. Many times races communication styles are seen different because of voice and diction while some are seen different because of body movement and gestures. Some roll their “r”s while others can’t even pronounce an “r” sound. Here, specifically, we will explore how the black race communicates differently than other races around the United States of America. Our findings show that there are obvious differences between communications styles of black people and other races, but there are also large differences between the black race itself. Black people do not talk the same in Dallas, Texas as they do in New York, New York. One example of this is black people down south tend to have a slower pace of speaking than those up north.

These differing communication styles can cause many results, whether that is positive or negative. Conflict is an ever present negative result of different communication styles. This is usually brought about by the non-verbal side of communication. Since, as Albert Mehrabian has taught us, only 7% of communication is verbal, what people do through by non-verbal communication has a large impact on what message is conveyed in the end. Non-verbal communication whether it be volume, tone, rate of speech, or bodily gesture, lets the receiver of the information know whether or not the sender is happy, sad, angry, excited, etc. The black race tends to be louder no matter what emotion they are conveying so if someone was to here them it might be a little difficult to know what emotion they were experiencing at that moment in time. However, if they were there they could see what kind of gestures the sender was doing. They could either be giving someone “the finger” or they could be giving a pat on the back. Hopefully, at the end of this paper we will be able to decipher a black person from hearing verbal and seeing non-verbal communication because of the research done. In, Cross Cultural Communication, by Michelle LeBaron, LeBaron explains to us that there are four different variables that affect the way people communicate. These four variables are: time and space, fate and personality, face and face-saving and non-verbal communication. Not even one of these four variables play a small part in cross-cultural communication.

Different people in different places live their lives at different paces. While some people would analyze a situation and possibly “sleep on it” others would see the same situation and want to come to a solution within the hour. Also, while in some cultures they like to address one problem at a time, others address many at a time. Generally, in American meetings, one situation is looked over at a time and each person takes his/her turn to speak, this is called monochronic. On the other hand, during meetings in the east, people speak all at the same time and over many different subjects. They see nothing wrong with talking over