“Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can't, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.”
-Robert Frost - 
Before we go into the more exciting stuff, we should cover the basics first. Considered as one of the most valuable interpersonal skills right now, communication helps you share information from one person to another and multiple people at once.
There are many ways and styles to communicate, and what you may be using right now is perfectly valid (albeit with some necessary tweaks here and there). But it would be best that you try to discover how crucial it is to properly communicate your thoughts and feelings to others as well as interpret those being directed at you .

The Importance of Communication
So what is the point of trying to improve the way you communicate and interpret things? What you may not have realized is that communication is involved in almost every aspect of your life.
Have you ever had those moments when people were able to get what you were saying without technically saying anything at all? A mere nod of your head or how you grip another hand in a handshake can give lots of messages, depending on the context of the situation.
Or how about when you talk to three different people at the same time, and they end up reacting differently to what you just said? You told them the same thing, and yet one was happy, another became confused, and another was potentially offended. Why is this so? It goes back to the receiving part of communications, and people often react differently to the same stimulus.
The point is that communication helps you share ideas, build relationships, close potentially rewarding transactions, manage a group, and delegate tasks. If anything has to do with interacting with another living, breathing being, you can be certain that such a situation will rely heavily on your existing communication skills.

The Types of Communication
Regardless of your approach to speaking your mind, all forms of communication will fall under four distinct categories:

Verbal
This is perhaps the one that is easiest to understand as it is the one that you are going to use a lot regularly. Verbal communication involves your mouth and your brain. Nothing else.
However, its sheer simplicity is also what makes verbal communication one of the trickier aspects of communicating your thoughts and feelings. Without the proper tone, body language, and mood, you could easily end up being misunderstood by what you just said a few seconds ago.
This aspect of communication also has the widest range of styles. Some people are so verbose that you’d think you are talking next to a humanoid thesaurus. Others are curt and blunt, getting straight to the point, damn all the consequences. And then some can take too long to get to their main message because they digress.
Learning how to make your style compatible with others will help you a lot in becoming an expert in verbal communication.

Non-Verbal
This is where all physical gestures and cues will fall under. Also, the facial expressions that you use to convey what you are verbally communicating will be included here as well. For example, smiling while telling a story gives the impression that the information you are about to offer is good to listen to.
What makes non-verbal communication so crucial is that your ability to pick them up and understand them will help you adjust your behavior in any situation. For instance, a potential client of yours is crossing his arms, and this could tell you that they are not sold on what you are saying and need further convincing.
Alternatively, the tapping of feet is a telltale sign that the person is in a hurry to cut the conversation and go somewhere else. A relaxed position, on the other hand, could tell you that the person might be agreeable to anything that you might propose. For now, at least.

Written
Technically speaking, written communication is also non-verbal, but it has some qualities that warrant it being its own class. Written communication involves every act to include writing, typing, or printing text and symbols onto something physical and digital.
Out of all the forms of communication, this is the one that is most tangible as it is seen through books, pamphlets, blogs, emails, memos, letters, and other printed mediums. Consequently, this is the type of communication that has a sense of permanency as the things that you wrote can be, figuratively speaking, set in stone.
For instance, Sun Tzu has been dead for over a millennium now, and yet, The Art of War is still being printed and read in different languages. The same goes for Shakespeare, Plato, Newton, King David, and even the Founding Fathers of America.
Because written words tend to last longer than you and might even represent your legacy to younger generations, you must be as accurate with it as possible.

Visual
Out of all the forms of communication, this is perhaps the most artistic. The phrase “a picture paints a thousand words” is highly applicable here as one image can tell very different messages for every person looking at it, depending on their mood in that instance.
The visual medium is often used to support your words by providing context. Let us say that you are telling your superiors that sales figures for the past few months have been subpar. Wouldn’t it help your case if you had something like a pie chart that would give your listeners a visual anchor point to better understand your words?
But, even on its own, visuals can convey messages that could help someone make a connection with what they have seen and what they are feeling. As such, careful use of images is key to a lot of fields, especially advertising.

What Good Communication Skills Can Bring to You
If communication is a major part of your day-to-day living, then improving your skills will yield you several benefits, which will accompany you through all the different facets of your life.

Trust Building
Learning how to properly convey your thoughts and feelings can be a good foundation where you can build trust with others. An ability to listen intently to whatever one person is telling you and seeing things from their perspective gives the impression that you are making decisions not only for yourself but for everyone else.
By being an active listener, you also make the people around you comfortable enough to be open with their thoughts and feelings. This fosters an atmosphere of trust, especially in relationships that require the performance of obligations and duties or collaborative effort.
Here is a classic scenario: If you are the team leader and your team is about to make a decision, the most sensible thing that you can do is to let others air out their concerns and provide alternatives. Then, once all concerns, issues, and alternative routes are presented, the team votes on which decision the entire group is going to take.
Sure, the final decision will not satisfy everyone, but, at the very least, you provide people on your team with a forum where they are free to speak their minds and be listened to. This is a far better option than a “It’s my way or the highway!” approach to decision making where nobody else can dictate the actions of the team but you.

Solving Problems (and Preventing Them)
It is often said that problems exist because of pure miscommunication. There is no shortage of examples out there of a falling-out between groups or destruction of public images just because one person conveyed their thoughts and feelings poorly.
Here is a scenario: Let us say that one of your friends just got a makeover for a special event. When you see her, what would be the most sensible thing to say? Would it be “Why, you look lovelier today!” or “Hey, I never knew you could be this pretty!”? If your answer would sound something like the latter, then you tend to inadvertently generate conflict where you go.
Meaning well, yet being misunderstood, is a problem that most face. But learning how to be tactful with your words does help iron out issues that you have with others and prevent them from occurring again in the future.

Clarity and Direction
A good communicator knows how to provide clearly-defined expectations, objectives, and ideas to the people they are talking to. This is quite helpful in group efforts, where a clear line of communication between members is necessary.
Suppose that a member is not performing up to standard. A good communicator will know how to tell them that they need to get back on track without offending them. It is all too easy for a person to get angry and bite at the people they think are lagging. With good communication skills, on the other hand, you can help people understand what they need to do in the most diplomatic way possible.
Of course, fostering an open line of communication between group members helps in eliminating conflicts and misunderstanding. Perhaps one team member is about to get into a fight with another member. With good communication skills, you can intervene and give them a place where they can talk things out (with you as the mediator). This way, you can address issues that your team faces and get back on track to finish the task as quickly as possible.
And clarity does not only work with group efforts. Being clear requires you to be at your simplest and most direct when it comes to talking. This means you can tell people what you are trying to say in a few words or less with no digressions at all.
Doing so helps people get the message behind what you are trying to say without wasting time deciphering your monologue. After all, nobody likes to start a conversation with someone who takes five sentences to answer a simple categorical question.

Better Relationships
Perhaps the most direct benefit of improving your communication skills is that you can easily build or maintain interpersonal relationships. After all, you can now speak effectively, tactfully, and openly, which gives the impression to people that you are a person that has nothing to hide. Transparency, after all, is a quality that is hard to manifest unless you know how to say the right thing at the right time and using the right words.
Not only can you speak well, but you also learn how to listen to others. This gives the impression that you are also considerate with how other people think and feel and, in turn, respect differences in opinions. This would foster a relationship built on mutual trust and respect.

Reading and Responding to “Cues”
You might be surprised by this, but not everything that is ever conveyed to you will be 100%. This is quite true in tense and stressful situations where the things not said can dictate how things would happen as much as the things that were said in public.
And it also does not help that some personality types are difficult to handle by default. A pushy salesman, an angry boss, a detail-heavy mechanic, a mother who is stuck in traffic and is driving her kids to soccer practice. All of these require you to pick up on non-verbal cues in order to respond with the right words .
A bit of awareness of the body language of others can give you a great advantage when closing deals and finding solutions for problems. Also, it helps you adjust the tone of your verbal message so that it fits the overall mood of the place and the mentality of the people listening to you.
Here is a good example. Suppose you are delivering a lecture and notice that most of the class is tuning you out because your class is boring. You can inject humor or draw from your life experiences to get the attention of everybody as jokes and personal stories can make people connect to what you are saying. With good communication skills, you can pay attention to how people are reacting to your message and adjust your delivery accordingly.

Improving Productivity
Once the hindrances towards proper communication are done with (more of them on a later chapter), everybody around you knows what you can do and will find you a more reliable person. This is effective in group efforts as, now, members can get the idea that they don’t have to do everything just to complete a task.
With good communication, workloads can be distributed quickly, conflicts settled before they get out of hand, and you can deal with your stress in the most direct yet diplomatic manner possible. In essence, by communicating better, you get things done as soon as possible, which makes you a more productive person overall.

Making a Good Impression
Presenting yourself can be a rather nerve-wracking experience. Even if you have well-prepared material for your presentation, the execution of your plan can be derailed if your nerves get the better of you.
One good skill you will learn in improving your communication is how to deal with what is effectively called “stage fright.” Learning how to manage your nervousness before going in front of people and conveying your thoughts assertively and authoritatively can make you a far more convincing speaker .
Presentation also involves how you can recover from any mistake without losing stride in front of everyone. This will include learning how to turn your mistakes into something humorous to endear yourself to the public and also cut off dead air in your presentation.
All in all, good communication skills can allow you to present your message in a way that is attractive and yet easy to understand.

The Qualities of Good Communicators
As was stated, communication is a skill that must be developed over time. Practice is what eventually elevates you from a less than efficient communicator to a good one.
The end goal of becoming a good communicator is to make everyone who is involved in a conversation feel like their contribution to it will matter. And in order for that to happen, a communicator must possess a certain set of skills.

Active Listening
Knowing how to form your message is one good skill, but a more important one is to receive those messages being directed to you. Instead of interrupting other people or taking away the focus from that person to them, a good communicator focuses on what is being told to them.
Listening intently and letting the other person finish is also not enough. A good communicator also understands the value of letting the person talking confirm that their message is being received and processed. Through nods and other short non-verbal messages, a communicator tells the speaker that they are tuned in to the conversation.
This would help in preventing conversations from becoming monologues while also helping a person with a problem find the most effective solution for it.

Empathy
There is this misconception that communication needs to be mired with protocol and politically- correct term usage in order to be effective. This only makes conversations stiffer for the participants and, in some cases, artificial.
Instead, a good communicator will seek opportunities wherein meaningful dialogue can take place, and collaboration is assured. These can only be made possible if they truly understand where the other person is coming from and how they view certain issues.
Rather than force their own opinions into a certain matter, a good communicator will understand how people feel in a certain situation and adjust their approach accordingly. This is quite essential in negotiations or even in building cordial relationships with others. If you are not the person that can see things from perspectives other than your own, or learn how to adjust in situations, then you need to acquire these skills to be an effective communicator.

An Open Mind
To assume is a human tendency, but this can often lead to conflicts. For instance, you might think that a person is dominating the conversation when it is just his natural way of speaking. Or what if you assume a person to be shy or timid just because he does not talk a lot?
Either way, assuming too quickly can be detrimental in conversations as it leaves space open for future conflict. A good communicator will clarify things first and seek to get the most basic information right. This way, the message that they are about to deliver gets perceived in a manner that they intended for it to be perceived as.

A Positive Mindset
Enthusiasm can be a rather hard emotion to maintain, especially if one is already used to being cynical. However, it can also be an effective tool in engaging with people as it naturally makes them excited for what is to transpire in the conversation.
Offsetting negativity is a key quality good communicators have since a few negative comments are all it takes to derail an entire conversation. By rallying people to their cause and making them excited for what is about to happen next, a good communicator can teach people to be motivated and even resilient when the tougher times come.

To Summarize
The truth is that communication is a rather simple concept to follow. You do not need to even have a higher level of learning to be a good communicator. All it takes is for you to have the right mindset and approach to get the best benefits of being a good communicator.
Now, in a perfect world, the conveying of thoughts and ideas follows a rather simple path and would lead to a beneficial conclusion. But we aren’t living in a perfect world, are we?

So why do our day-to-day communications seem, for lack of a better word, flawed?