Language Styles and Skills

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The language skills and styles can easily prevent or encourage the effective communication on individuals. In Maxine Hong Kingston's article “Silence”, she describes how being “silent” prevents her from having effective communication with her teachers and classmates. Kingston finds herself to be very quite among other children and feels alienated from those who speak English as their first language. In another article “Learning the Language” written by Perri Klass, she discusses how abbreviation usage can both prevent and encourage people to have effective conversations. Although Klass learns to use the special doctor codes which make it easier for her and her co-workers to communicate at the hospital, she finds it cold and heartless while her abbreviation skills also distance herself from the patients. In order to have a good and effective communication, people have to be able to understand each other at first. In Deborah Tannenin article “Men and Women Talking on the Job,” she claims how male's misunderstanding of female's supportive speech style prevents the two genders to have inefficient communication. Kingston's language style of being “silent” becomes an obstacle for her to learn English; Klass's language skills of abbreviating certain words both encourages and negatively affects her conversations with others; Tannenin's interpretations of men's straight-forward and women's supportive language style can also result inefficient communication among people. Thus, when it comes to language skills and styles, they tend to do both jobs of preventing and encouraging individuals' effective communications. Kingston becomes silent and fears to speak English which prevents her to communicate well to others. She writes about how she is so nervous when talking to a clerk or even a bus driver when she first arrives in America. “I stand frozen, or I hold up the line with
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