# Oral and Written Communication Skills: What They Are and How to Build Them Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/oral-and-written-communication-skills/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/oral-and-written-communication-skills.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving communication at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer What oral and written communication skills mean at work, how to tell which one you're weaker at, and practical ways to improve both, with real examples. ## Key facts - Title: Oral and Written Communication Skills: What They Are and How to Build Them - Category: Communication - Primary skill: Communication - Related skills: Influence, Building Confidence - Primary keyword: oral and written communication skills - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/oral-and-written-communication-skills/ ## What this page covers - What oral and written communication skills mean at work, how to tell which one you're weaker at, and practical ways to improve both, with real examples. - Practical guidance for oral and written communication skills - How this topic connects to Communication ## Detailed explanation Oral and written communication skills are the ability to make yourself understood when you speak and when you write at work: picking the right channel for the message, saying what you mean clearly and briefly, leading with the main point, [adapting to the person receiving it](/knowledge/influence/know-your-audience/), and [listening closely](/knowledge/communication/active-listening-workplace/) enough to know whether it landed. Most people meet that exact phrase on a job advertisement or a university competency list rather than in conversation, which is part of why it feels harder to answer than it should. It is a formal label for a set of ordinary, everyday behaviors, and those behaviors are more specific than the label makes them sound. ## What are oral and written communication skills, exactly? They are two halves of the same job: getting a message from your head into someone else's, accurately enough that they can act on it. The written half covers the artifacts your work leaves behind. Across workplace guides from Indeed and the Niagara Institute, the same list recurs: emails, memos, internal announcements, policy updates, and reports carrying findings and a recommendation. The oral half covers the moments where work gets decided: [team meetings](/knowledge/communication/attending-meetings/), status updates, discussions where a call has to be made, presentations to colleagues or clients. Notice what is not on either list. No keynote, no stage, no audience of hundreds. Reading "oral communication skills" as a euphemism for public speaking makes it sound like something you either have or do not. One more thing belongs in the oral half. The University of Notre Dame's career-readiness definition includes "listen for meaning and understanding" alongside expressing ideas. Half of what gets assessed as oral communication happens while you are not talking. ## What is the difference between oral and written communication? Comparison guides such as KeyDifferences and Study.com converge on four differences that matter at work. **Feedback speed.** When you speak, you see the reaction as it happens and can adjust mid-sentence. Writing gives you nothing back until a reply arrives, if one does. **Permanence.** Writing leaves a record someone can retrieve in six months. Speech does not — a feature when you are thinking out loud, a problem when you need proof of what was agreed. **Revisability.** You can draft an email four times before anyone sees it. A sentence you said in a meeting cannot be recalled. **Non-verbal signal.** Tone, pace, and expression carry meaning plain text does not, which is why a neutral message can read as cold. One difference those sources name that you should ignore: several present speech as informal and writing as formal. In a workplace that is simply wrong. A performance conversation is spoken and highly formal; a message to your team channel is written and highly casual. Formality is set by the situation, not the channel — and mapping the two onto each other is what produces a stiff, over-polished email or a meeting contribution that lands as too loose. ## When should I send an email instead of just talking to someone? This is the question the comparison tables never quite answer. Those four contrasts are not trivia to memorize; they are the basis for a choice you make several times a day. Choose a conversation when you are building trust, when the topic is sensitive, when the subject is complicated enough that you will need to check understanding as you go, when something has to be negotiated, or when you are working a problem out rather than reporting a conclusion. All of those need the feedback speed and the non-verbal signal that writing strips out. Choose writing when the other person needs time to absorb or respond, when the exchange needs to be documented, or when the message is one-way information that requires no discussion. The common mistake runs in one direction. People default to writing because it feels safer, then spend three days on an email chain a six-minute conversation would have closed — and damage the relationship on the way, because tone is the first casualty of a long thread. ## Which matters more at work, speaking or writing? Neither wins outright, but they are judged on different schedules. Employers rate writing highly at the hiring stage without putting it at the very top. In the AAC&U's 2021 employer report, as summarized by the University of Illinois professional writing program, employers ranked writing just behind teamwork, critical thinking, data analysis, and digital literacy among what they look for in graduates. The more useful point is what happens after hiring. Speaking is assessed in bursts, at interviews and presentations. Writing is assessed continuously, because nearly every task you complete produces a written artifact someone else has to read and act on. Nobody schedules a review of your emails. They simply form a view. ## How do I know which one I'm weaker at? Almost everyone is noticeably stronger in one of the two, and almost nobody has been told which. It is the most useful thing to find out, and the one thing the available advice skips. Two rough tests. Which one do you avoid? If you would rather send a message than walk over and ask, your discomfort is oral. If you reread a two-line email six times before sending, it is written. Then look at where things have gone wrong lately: was the misunderstanding caused by something you wrote, or something you said, or failed to say, in a room? Both rely on your own read of yourself, which is where they get unreliable. People misjudge how they come across, and the point of a blind spot is that it does not feel like one. So it is worth getting [an outside read on this](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) rather than guessing, and asking one colleague you trust for a specific observation beats another hour of self-examination. ## How do I improve my written communication at work? Nothing here requires a course. It is a handful of habits, applied consistently. Lead with your main message rather than building up to it; the reader should know what you want in the first line, not the fourth paragraph. Write a subject line that names the actual content, so the message can be found later. Cut anything the reader does not need in order to act. Send it only to people who genuinely need it, because extra names create work and dilute ownership. Proofread once. Reply within a reasonable window, or acknowledge you have seen it and will come back. The strongest single habit is brevity. A short, clear message gets read; a long one gets skimmed and half-understood. ## How do I get better at speaking up if it makes me nervous? By making the step smaller than the one you are avoiding. The instinct is to treat speaking as a single wall to get over, so the practice becomes a presentation to the department. It works better as levels. Ask one clarifying question in a meeting of four people. Give a status update you prepared in advance. Say the thing you were going to say afterward in the corridor, in the room instead. Each is small enough to survive and specific enough to repeat. The aim is not to stop feeling nervous. That mostly stays; what changes is that it stops deciding whether you speak. [Waiting to feel ready](/knowledge/confidence/boost-self-confidence/) first is why many capable people spend years silent in meetings. ## How do I show oral and written communication skills on a resume? Every resume guide gives the same instruction, and it is correct: delete the claim and describe an instance. Indeed, Resume Genius, and ResumeWorded all advise against "excellent communicator" in favor of a specific act with a specific result — presenting quarterly results to a named number of stakeholders, and the decision that followed. Sound advice, with a catch. You cannot narrate an instance you have never had. If the claim feels hollow to write, that is a supply problem rather than a wording one, and the fix is upstream: run the meeting, write the report, volunteer to summarize the project, and you will have something concrete to point at. Two things worth knowing. Your application is itself a writing sample, read as one before anyone reads what it claims. And in an interview the oral half is assessed throughout, including how you listen to the question you were actually asked. ## The skills that make both halves easier Read back over those answers and a pattern surfaces. Very little of the difficulty is about vocabulary or grammar. The email that goes wrong should have been a conversation. The point that does not land was never shaped around the person hearing it. The silence in the meeting is not a lack of anything to say. **Communication** is where most of this lives, and it is far more practical than the phrase on the job advertisement suggests: choosing conversation over writing and knowing why, stating the main point first, being brief, adapting to how the other person takes information in, and handling the awkward moments — the disagreement, the apology, the piece of feedback — instead of avoiding them. These are behaviors you can pick up in a week and refine for years. **Influence** answers a question the job ad leaves out entirely: why employers want this at all. It is not tidy prose for its own sake. Work only moves when someone is persuaded, and both halves of your communication are how that happens. It means preparing around what matters to the other person, keeping the case simple, using a real example rather than an abstraction, naming the drawbacks yourself, and following through afterward. None of it requires seniority. **Building Confidence** matters because the two halves fail differently. Writing fails privately and can be fixed by revision; speaking fails in front of people and cannot be taken back, which is why the oral side is where most people quietly stall. The way through is not a technique for the moment but evidence built beforehand: a smaller step, practiced, then the next one. Those three sit inside a wider set of twelve skills that recur across almost any job, and a gap in any of them is something you have not learned yet rather than something you are not. Working out [which ones to build first](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) beats working on all of them at once, and the free test covers the whole set, not only the communication part. ## Where this leaves you You may recognize some of this in how you already work. Most people arrive here with one half in reasonable shape without ever having been told so, and the honest picture is usually less bleak on one side and more fixable on the other. Nothing here asks you to become a different sort of person. The habits that make writing clear and the practice that makes speaking easier are both learnable, and they leave your personality where it is. They also compound: the further into a career you go, the more of your work is carried by what you write and say. By reading this far you have already done the thing most people skip: treating a phrase from a job advertisement as a real question rather than a box to tick. The useful next move is finding out where you stand. ## Find out where your skills stand You have a clear enough picture of what these skills involve; the remaining unknown is which of them are already working for you and which are not. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills. It takes about 7 minutes, you do it on your own with nobody watching, and it shows where you stand across all twelve of the skills that shape working life, including the communication ones covered here. You come away knowing which one or two would make the biggest difference to you right now. **Take the skills test** Free, no sign-up, and about 7 minutes from start to your results. ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? What oral and written communication skills mean at work, how to tell which one you're weaker at, and practical ways to improve both, with real examples. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Communication. It also relates to Influence, Building Confidence. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/influence.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/confidence.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/oral-and-written-communication-skills/ Preferred summary: "What oral and written communication skills mean at work, how to tell which one you're weaker at, and practical ways to improve both, with real examples." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.