# Oral and Written Communication: The 10 Behaviors Behind the Phrase Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/oral-and-written-communication/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/oral-and-written-communication.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 Oral and written communication is the competency employers rank first. Here are the ten concrete behaviors behind the phrase, and how to tell where you stand. ## Key facts - Title: Oral and Written Communication: The 10 Behaviors Behind the Phrase - Category: Communication - Primary skill: Communication - Related skills: Building Confidence, Influence - Primary keyword: oral and written communication - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/oral-and-written-communication/ ## What this page covers - Oral and written communication is the competency employers rank first. Here are the ten concrete behaviors behind the phrase, and how to tell where you stand. - Practical guidance for oral and written communication - How this topic connects to Communication ## Detailed explanation You have most likely met the phrase somewhere it was not explained: a job posting, a selection-criteria form, a university competency list. Oral and written communication is the ability to exchange information, ideas, facts and perspectives clearly with people inside and outside an organization — speaking and writing to inform, instruct and persuade different audiences, and listening for meaning rather than waiting to reply. It is not a personality type or a gift for words. It is a set of specific behaviors, and each one can be checked and learned on its own. That last point matters, because this is the competency where your own view of your ability and your employer's come apart most sharply — and not for the reason most people assume. ## What employers mean by oral and written communication The phrase reads oddly because it is institutional language. It comes from the career-readiness competencies published by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, where oral/written communication sits alongside teamwork, professionalism and five others as one of eight things employers say they look for in new graduates. NACE defines it as clearly and effectively exchanging information, ideas, facts and perspectives with people inside and outside the organization — broad on purpose, since it has to cover everything from a two-minute status update to a client report. It also outranks almost everything else on that list. In NACE's career-readiness validation research, 91.6% of employers rated oral/written communication essential or absolutely essential — not because employers are unusually fond of well-written emails, but because communication is the layer everything else is delivered through. Nobody can see your analysis, your judgment or your reliability except through how you write and speak about them. Being weak at it does not only cost you the communication mark; it conceals everything else you are good at. Then there is the gap. NACE's perception research found around 78% of students consider themselves proficient in communication, while only about 53.5% of employers agree — a spread of roughly 25 percentage points, one of the three widest of any competency. The specific complaint is not the one most people brace for. Employers do not report that graduates write ungrammatically or speak inarticulately. They report concision and audience awareness: messages that are too long, and messages organized for the writer rather than the reader. That is close to the exact opposite of what years of education rewarded, where length signaled effort and the reader was obliged to reach the end. Which makes your own estimate the weakest instrument in the room — a 25-point gap is a gap in self-knowledge before it is one in ability. A short free assessment gives you [an outside read on this](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/), and since these are behaviors rather than traits, whatever it turns up is changeable. ## The ten behaviors behind oral and written communication Underneath the phrase sit two modes and one decision that comes before both of them. Here they are as things you do, rather than qualities you have. ### 1. Choosing whether to speak or to write This precedes every other decision on the list, and almost nothing written about the competency covers it — the standard treatment presents the two modes as parallel skill sets rather than as a choice. Choose conversation when you need to build trust, when the topic is sensitive or contested, when it is complicated, or when you are negotiating and solving a problem together. Choose writing when the other person needs time to absorb it, when there has to be a record, or when the message is one-way information. A beautifully written email about a difficult subject still fails, because the subject needed a conversation. ### 2. Putting the main point first Both modes, and the fastest single change available. State the conclusion, the decision or the ask in the first line of an email and the first sentence of a spoken update, then give the reasoning underneath. Coursework trained you in the reverse — build the case, arrive at the conclusion — because the reader was required to finish. Colleagues are not. They skim, they stop, and a point sitting in the fourth paragraph often never arrives at all. ### 3. Being brief Concision is one of the two written weaknesses employers name specifically, and it is a habit problem rather than a writing problem. In an essay, length demonstrated the work behind the answer. At work, length transfers your workload onto the reader. The practical version is to cut to what the person needs in order to act, leaving the supporting detail available rather than compulsory — under the ask, in an attachment, or in the conversation they will start if they want it. ### 4. Writing and speaking for the person receiving it The other named weakness. The same facts need a different shape for a manager, a technical colleague and a customer, because what each of them has to decide is different, so what belongs at the top is different. This is what the competency's official wording means by multiple audiences. It is also the least intuitive behavior here, since the version that feels clearest to you is usually the version arranged in the order you worked the problem out. ### 5. Listening for meaning Listening is written into the definition of the competency rather than attached to it — the standard formulation ends "as well as to listen for meaning and understanding." In practice: [full attention](/knowledge/communication/active-listening-in-communication/), let them finish, and say enough back that they can tell you understood. It is the half of the requirement that an output-focused idea of communication quietly drops, and the half a manager in the same meeting sees most clearly. ### 6. Speaking up in meetings Meetings are where oral communication is actually observed and judged. What helps is knowing which of the four kinds of meeting you are in — information, problem-solving, status or team-building — preparing one useful contribution rather than improvising, and moderating how long you hold the floor. The non-verbal channel counts here too: definitional sources fold tone, pace and body language into the oral half, so preparing only the words prepares only part of it. ### 7. Email someone can act on Email is the largest sample of your written communication anyone will ever see, which makes it disproportionately decisive. [Subject lines](/knowledge/communication/how-to-write-effective-emails/) that state the actual content. Only the recipients who need to be there. The main message in the opening line. A proofread before sending. A reply inside a reasonable window, even when it is only an acknowledgement. None of it impresses individually; the cumulative effect on how organized you appear is large. ### 8. Handling the exchanges that go wrong [Disagreeing](/knowledge/teamwork/how-to-disagree-respectfully/), giving and receiving feedback, apologizing, dealing with someone who is angry. These are the moments when communication stops being a delivery task and becomes a relationship one, and they are almost entirely missing from the pages that define the competency. Two things carry the weight: keep a disagreement about the work rather than the person, and when you are being corrected, understand the point fully before adding your own view — the instinct to defend in the moment is what turns a correction into a conflict. ### 9. Making a case someone can say yes to Persuade sits in the official definition and almost nowhere in the explanations. The workable version is unglamorous. Work out beforehand what the other person is weighing, [keep the pitch simple](/knowledge/influence/how-to-be-persuasive/), use a concrete example or a demonstration instead of description, name the drawbacks yourself before anyone else does, and when an objection comes, hear all of it before answering. If a full yes looks unlikely, ask for the smaller version of it. ### 10. Showing evidence instead of claiming the skill Every resume source on this topic lands in the same place: "excellent written and verbal communication skills" is close to a negative signal, because everyone writes it. What works is a specific instance — the document you wrote and what it changed, the meeting you ran, the disagreement you defused. For a selection-criteria field or an interview answer, that is the entire task: one situation, what you did, what came of it. ## Where these ten behaviors come from Read back over the list and it is fairly clear that ten separate things is not how anyone improves. They cluster, and the cluster is the level worth working at. **Communication** holds most of what you just read — the channel choice, the main-point-first habit, concision, adapting to the receiver, the listening, the meeting behavior, the email discipline, the awkward conversations. Treating it as one skill governed by a small set of principles, rather than a folder of tips, is what makes it improvable: you learn the principles once and apply them wherever they land. Very little of it is presenting or public speaking. Nearly all of it is the ordinary traffic of a working week, which is why it improves quickly — you get several attempts a day. **Building Confidence** decides whether the oral half ever happens. Most people who stay quiet in meetings are not short of something to say; saying it carries a social cost they would rather not pay. The way through is not feeling ready first. It is acting at a size you can manage — one prepared point, early, long before any presentation — accepting the discomfort as part of the transaction rather than a signal to stop, and when something lands badly, working out what went wrong rather than who was. The confidence follows the attempt. **Influence** is where the persuade half of the definition actually lives. It rests less on delivery than on preparation and standing: knowing what the other person is weighing before you make the ask, putting the drawbacks on the table alongside the case, then following through on what you promised so the next ask starts from firmer ground. This is the ethical version rather than the technique version — changing a mind with evidence and a relationship, not extracting a yes you could not have defended. Which of the three is your actual constraint is hard to see from the inside; a capable writer who never speaks up has a confidence problem, not a communication one. The free Work Skills Test scores you across **all twelve skills in the set these three belong to**, so you can find out [which of these three](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) is holding the other two back. Some of the ten will have read as obvious, most likely because you already do them — almost everyone arrives at work with three or four intact, untaught. Worth registering rather than skipping past: the competency is not a wall you are standing outside of. The rest are behaviors, not features of who you are. Replying within a day, putting the ask in the first line, letting someone finish before you answer — none of it requires becoming louder or more outgoing, and the handful that would make the most difference to you now is a much shorter list than ten. What does change is the weight: the further into a career you go, the more of the work runs through other people, so this competency carries more of your reputation each year rather than less. By reading past the phrase in the job posting to find out what it actually names, you have already done the part most people skip. ## Find out where your communication actually stands The only thing left is to see which part of this is yours. The Work Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills: you answer a set of questions and get a profile of how you score across all twelve — communication, confidence and influence among them — plus which of them would make the biggest difference to you now. No preparation, and nothing to read first. **[Get my skills profile](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/)** *Free, and it takes about 7 minutes.* ## 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? Oral and written communication is the competency employers rank first. Here are the ten concrete behaviors behind the phrase, and how to tell where you stand. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Communication. It also relates to Building Confidence, Influence. ### 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/confidence.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/influence.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/ Preferred summary: "Oral and written communication is the competency employers rank first. Here are the ten concrete behaviors behind the phrase, and how to tell where you stand." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.