Malcolm Cox

Tuesday Teaching Tips | Episode 272 | “The Myth About Non-Verbal Communication” The oft-repeated claim is that communication is 7 percent verbal, 38 percent vocal, and 55 percent facial. Is this true? Those statistics come from two studies conducted in 1967. Their conclusions have become accepted orthodoxy, but there are serious methodological limitations to those studies. The author of Communication is 93% Nonverbal: An Urban Legend Proliferates, by David Lapakko (Associate professor at the department of communication studies at Augsburg College, Minneapolis) says, “What that number tells people is to pay little attention to the words they use, because words don’t really matter.“* Do words matter? How significant is body language? What do you remember of the body language connected to the following speakers? Martin Luther King Jr’s “I have a dream”? Or Churchill’s, “We will fight them on the beaches….”, or, Shakespeare/Hamlet’s, “To be or not to be”, or, “When you pray, say, “Our Father who art in heaven