Communication is changing - and most universities haven’t kept up

Almost everyone can agree communication is important. There is much less agreement about what, exactly, communication is or how best to develop skills in it.Communication today is more multi-modal than ever, but we still tend to give and receive the most training in writing. Our national survey of introductory communications courses in 2020, just published in the journal Communication Research and Practice, found more than 70% of assignments in the sample evaluated only a single communication mode. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 85.7% of these were in written form. Less than a third of the assessment pieces were multi-modal. And only 11% enabled students to practise their spoken, written and visual communication skills in an integrated way. While writing is certainly a critical communication skill, it’s not the only one. We make and receive messages in spoken or visual form every day. We sometimes seem to believe just by using these modes we’ll naturally get better at them over time. Sadly, anyone who’s sat through a typical PowerPoint presentation or unending Zoom meetings knows even senior professionals and heads of government often are unaware of or ignore best practices for crafting an effective message in written, spoken or visual form. And with these three modes being increasingly bundled together, it’s time to stop studying them in isolation. We need to start learning how to thoughtfully integrate them.