Verbal Fluency

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the most important academic skill. . .LANGUAGE SKILLS.

You should learn:

1.

That important people DO judge by appearance, with special attention to verbal behavior.

2.

Why some people recommend studying Latin.

3.

The steps in processing verbal information, and the importance of elaborative rehearsal.

4.

How information processing becomes automatic

5.

The steps in generating verbal information, and the role of grammar.

6.

The all-important act of mental time-sharing as a learnable skill.

7.

The importance of motivation.

You should also study the following appendices:

• X. On Paraphrasing.
• X. On Grammar.

When leading educators, business executives, and government officials were asked which academic skills are the most important for success, the overwhelming consensus was: "verbal fluency." For this reason, I can confidently urge you to invest the effort required to develop a reasonable vocabulary and to become facile using it. In contemporary society, verbal skills are of paramount importance. The familiar expression, "Don't judge a book by its cover," is often applied to people as a warning that appearances can deceive us. For example, a warm, gentle person may hide beneath a very tough looking exterior, and a very insecure person may appear to be the epitome of self-confidence. You don't have to win beauty contests to be "pretty inside" and most of us would prefer to be judged, if at all, by the "real me" instead of the person we appear to be publicly. Nevertheless, people in important positions DO judge others by their outward appearance. In many cases, such as the job interview, that's all they really have to go on. But one's clothes and physical features are not the most critical part of one's appearance. . .it is one's verbal behavior that best reveals qualifications for admission, appointment, advancement, etc. Can you read well enough to follow instructions? Can you listen well enough to understand questions? Can you write and speak well enough to express yourself clearly. The one basic skill that stands out as being indispensable for success in very profession is verbal fluency. Furthermore, verbal fluency (or lack of it) is virtually impossible to disguise. A person can easily change clothes and can also do quite a bit to change one's physical appearance, but one's verbal behavior was learned gradually and it can therefore only be changed gradually. You can recognize the speech of a well-educated person even if s/he is dressed in dirty, tattered clothes, and an uneducated person cannot fake educated speech. A brief sample of the words you use and how you use them is an infallible guide to your general verbal fluency. The first ingredient of verbal fluency is a reasonably large vocabulary. I pointed out in an earlier chapter that knowledge is not verbal but that we use words to communicate knowledge. Obviously one cannot express an idea unless s/he has a rich enough vocabulary to put that idea into words. And even though an idea can usually be expressed in several different ways, there sometimes is only one "right" word for an occasion. The frequency with which many people use the expression, Y'know," is testimony to their inadequate vocabulary because they do not know a good word to express an idea and so they have to rely on their listener's imagination to try to guess what they are unable to put into words. This is the reason that I have emphasized vocabulary in this book. To succeed in college and in later life, you need an adequate vocabulary. But vocabulary is not all there is to being verbally fluent. . .you must put the words into meaningful sentences. This means knowing educated rammar.