Status Updates From Communication in the Real W...

"Irish immigrants were discriminated against and even portrayed as black in cartoons that appeared in newspapers. In some Southern states, Italian immigrants were forced to go to black schools, and it was not until 1952 that Asian immigrants were allowed to become citizens of the United States."

Yet, you don't hear us wining about it now, do you? School this week is making my blood boil, my gosh.

Chapter 7: "Personal identities may change often as people have new experiences and develop new interests and hobbies. A current interest in online video games may give way to an interest in graphic design."

I find that take so interesting since I do not have a current interest in video games, nor did I have one growing up. Mine was all book related.

Chapter 5: Listening

Our ability to recall information is dependent on some of the physiological limits of how memory works. Overall, our memories are known to be fallible. We forget about half of what we hear immediately after hearing it, recall 35 percent after eight hours, and recall 20 percent after a day (Hargie, 2011).

That's insanely interesting to me.

we naturally look away from others when we are processing information.

" In terms of head movements, a head nod is a universal sign of acknowledgement in cultures where the formal bow is no longer used as a greeting. In these cases, the head nod essentially serves as an abbreviated bow."

That I did not know; I wonder if I can incorporate that into MILK somehow.

Pitch, which is a part of vocalics, helps us cue others into our conversational intentions. A rising pitch typically indicates a question and a falling pitch indicates the end of a thought or the end of a conversational turn.

The stuff in this chapter is fascinating.

Deception is typically thought of as the intentional act of altering information to influence another person, which means that it extends beyond lying to include concealing, omitting, or exaggerating information. While verbal communication is to blame for the content of the deception, nonverbal communication partners with the language through deceptive acts to be more convincing.

Paralanguage is the vocalized but not verbal part of a spoken message, such as speaking rate, volume, and pitch. (In other words, paralanguage is everything that comes out of your throat as a sound, but is not a word.)

Grammarian. I did not know that such a word existed.

"Like me, you probably learned what the word apple meant by looking at the letters A-P-P-L-E and a picture of an apple and having a teacher or caregiver help you sound out the letters until you said the whole word. Over time, we associated that combination of letters with the picture of the red delicious apple and no longer had to sound each letter out."

"The relationship between the symbols that make up our language and their referents is arbitrary, which means they have no meaning until we assign it to them. In order to use a language effectively system, we have to learn, over time, which symbols go with which referents, since we cannot just tell by looking at the symbol."

I love it when school is actually interesting. Maybe my mother is right: I might be addicted to *shudders* learning.

"For something unexpected to become salient, it has to reach a certain threshold of difference." That is a genius way of putting it. Make. Your Words. Matter.

On chapter two now: I am guessing the page since there are no page numbers.

"Salience is the degree to which something attracts our attention in a particular context."

"There are two motives for learning to speak. Increasing one’s chance to succeed and increasing one’s power to serve.”