# 9 Verbal and Written Communication Skills That Matter at Work Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/verbal-and-written-communication-skills/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/verbal-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 Verbal and written communication skills, as nine concrete habits: choosing the channel, leading with your point, listening, and writing emails people act on. ## Key facts - Title: 9 Verbal and Written Communication Skills That Matter at Work - Category: Communication - Primary skill: Communication - Related skills: Influence, Building Confidence - Primary keyword: verbal and written communication skills - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/verbal-and-written-communication-skills/ ## What this page covers - Verbal and written communication skills, as nine concrete habits: choosing the channel, leading with your point, listening, and writing emails people act on. - Practical guidance for verbal and written communication skills - How this topic connects to Communication ## Detailed explanation The phrase turns up in job ads, selection criteria, and performance reviews, and it almost never arrives with an explanation. Verbal and written communication skills are the practical behaviors behind speaking and writing well at work: choosing whether something belongs in a conversation or in writing, leading with your main point, listening so the other person can tell you listened, [writing emails](/knowledge/communication/professional-email-writing/) that are easy to act on, and adjusting to whoever is receiving the message. The two halves are not one skill with two outlets. They tend to fail for opposite reasons, which is why "work on your communication" is such difficult advice to follow. ## What verbal and written communication skills look like in practice Which half carries more weight has shifted. Figures quoted widely across career sites, attributed to NACE's Job Outlook data, put written communication among the skills roughly 73% of employers look for on a graduate's resume, against roughly 59% for verbal — close to a reversal of 2021, when verbal led at about 73%. The explanation offered is remote and hybrid work: when fewer conversations happen in real time, more of what a junior colleague produces is text, and text is what people who never watch you work end up judging you on. The nine below cover both halves, and none of them ask you to be more outgoing than you are. ### 1. Decide whether it belongs in a conversation or in writing Before wording anything, pick the channel. A conversation is the better choice when you need to build trust, when the subject is sensitive, when the material is complicated, when something has to be negotiated, or when you are still working the problem out. Writing is better when the other person needs time to absorb it, when it has to be on the record, or when the message is one-way information. This decision is close to invisible in the advice online, which is strange, because most of the miscommunication people describe at work is a message sent in the wrong channel rather than one written badly. ### 2. Put the main point first, then stop earlier than feels natural Every guide tells you to be clear and concise; almost none of them says how. The structural version is simple: put the conclusion, the request, or the decision in the opening line, and the reasoning underneath it. Someone who stops reading after one sentence still has the message. The same rule works out loud — when a manager asks you something, answer, then explain. Brevity is the harder half of it. The instinct early in a career is to demonstrate thoroughness by including everything, which reliably produces the opposite impression. ### 3. Write emails people can act on Email is the format cited most often in workplace guidance on written communication, ahead of memos, internal announcements, and reports. The mechanics are narrower than the word "writing" suggests: a subject line that names the ask, only the recipients who actually need it, one request per message, a stated deadline rather than "as soon as possible," and a proofreading pass before you send. How often "proofread before sending" appears in these lists is itself informative. The common failure is not an inability to write. It is sending before rereading. ### 4. Listen in a way the other person can see [Active listening](/knowledge/communication/active-listening-in-communication/) is the most heavily covered sub-skill in this area, and the better sources describe it as behavior rather than attitude. Asana and Indeed both break it into discrete acts: pause before responding, restate the other person's point in close to their own words to confirm you have the facts, ask an open question, name the concern explicitly — acknowledging out loud that they are worried the timeline does not account for current workload, for instance — and let a short silence sit instead of filling it. Each one is small enough to try in a single meeting. ### 5. Adapt to the person on the other end Some colleagues want the headline and will ask if they need the reasoning. Others want the reasoning and distrust a bare conclusion. Some will reply to a message within ten minutes and quietly dread a call; for others it runs the other way. Adapting to the receiver means adjusting to that rather than defaulting to whatever feels natural to you. It is worth naming because of what it explains: sending the same message to two colleagues and having it land well with one and badly with the other usually gets read as a personality clash, when it is a format mismatch. ### 6. Speak up before you feel ready The verbal half rarely fails on vocabulary. It fails because the point never got made. The workable version is small and specific: decide before the meeting on one thing you will say, and say it early, while the topic is still open. The improvement advice in this area is consistently low-cost — recording yourself, running through it once out loud, asking someone you trust for honest feedback — and none of it requires a course. Video meetings make this measurably harder in a way worth knowing about: the audio cues that signal a natural opening are compressed or delayed, so waiting for a clean gap often means waiting past the moment. ### 7. Pay attention to the part of speaking that is not words Career-services and coaching sources, the University of Notre Dame's careers guidance and BetterUp among them, fold [tone of voice](/knowledge/communication/nonverbal-communication/), volume, pace, facial expression, and posture into verbal communication rather than treating them as a separate category. That is more reassuring than it first sounds. It means the verbal half is not mainly a test of eloquence or vocabulary, which is what most people assume is being judged when they hear the phrase. Speaking a little slower, or letting your face agree with what you are saying, changes how a message reads more than a better word choice does. ### 8. Keep the difficult conversations out of writing [Disagreeing with a decision](/knowledge/teamwork/how-to-disagree-respectfully/), giving someone feedback, apologizing for a mistake, dealing with somebody who is angry — these are where communication is hardest and where the consequences run largest. Nearly all of them belong in a conversation, which brings the list back to its first entry. Written versions read colder than intended, cannot answer the question they provoke, and stay on the record indefinitely. The one worth practicing first is disagreement: saying the objection out loud while keeping it about the work rather than the person. ### 9. Show the skill rather than claiming it There is a small irony in the phrase you searched for. Every major resume source in this space — Indeed, Zety, Rezi, Resume Worded — gives the same instruction: delete "strong verbal and written communication skills" from your resume and put an instance in its place. What you wrote or presented, who it was for, and what followed. One example quoted across these sources is simply a count of client prospecting emails produced and the leads that came from them. The phrase is the label; the evidence is what is actually being asked for. If you are about to write that line on an application, it is worth checking [what you can honestly claim](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) first — the free Work Skills Test is a quick way to find out. ## What makes these easier to do consistently Read back across the nine and notice how few of them turn on words. Most are decisions made before the words — which channel, what to lead with, when to speak, what to leave out — and the rest is a matter of doing the thing you already suspected you should do. That points at a small set of underlying capabilities rather than at a writing problem. **Communication** is the one the keyword names, and its usefulness is that it converts a job-ad phrase into a standard you can check yourself against: state the main point first, be clear and direct, be brief, adapt to the receiver, speak up, choose the medium deliberately, and handle the awkward situations — disagreement, feedback, an apology — instead of routing around them. None of those are things you either have or do not have. They are behaviors, and each can be practiced separately from the rest. **Influence** answers the question the nine entries leave open: communicating well toward what end. Usually you want a decision, a resource, or agreement. What moves those is preparation far more than delivery — working out what the other person gets from saying yes, establishing some rapport before making the case, keeping it simple, using a concrete example instead of an argument in the abstract, being honest about the drawbacks, and following up rather than assuming the conversation settled it. It is why two people can make the same proposal and only one of them gets an answer. **Building Confidence** decides whether any of the above gets used. The gap between knowing you should raise something and actually raising it does not get closed by feeling ready. It gets closed by evidence, accumulated from small deliberate attempts — choosing in advance which meeting and which point, then doing it once and seeing what happens. The same applies to the email you have rewritten four times and still not sent. Quiet people do all of this; the changes are behavioral, not a matter of becoming someone else. Which of the three is your actual constraint is hard to judge from the inside, and guessing wrong sends months of effort to the wrong place. The free Work Skills Test shows you [where your own gap sits](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) — and **these three sit inside a wider set of twelve that it measures**, so you see them in context rather than one at a time. ## Most of this is already partly true of you Some of the nine probably describe how you already work. Most people arrive at their first job doing several of them correctly without ever having been taught, and one or two of them badly, with no reliable way of telling which is which. That is an ordinary starting position rather than a verdict, and nothing here asks you to become more talkative or more outgoing than you are — the changes are behavioral, and they hold whichever way you happen to be wired. What is worth knowing is that the weight of this grows. The more your work depends on other people understanding it, the larger the share of your week goes into explaining it, aligning on it, and negotiating around it, which is also why it is cheaper to practice now, while the cost of getting a message slightly wrong is still small. And you have just spent several minutes on a phrase most people scroll past in a job ad without asking what it meant. ## A quiet way to see where you stand The only thing left is finding out where you actually stand, and that is a small, private thing you can do before your next meeting. The Work Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills: you answer questions about how you handle ordinary situations at work, and it shows you where you land across all twelve of them — communication among them — and which ones would repay attention first. It takes about seven minutes. There is nothing to prepare, no right answers, and the results are yours rather than an employer's. **Take the skills test** Free, about 7 minutes, and nothing to prepare. ## 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? Verbal and written communication skills, as nine concrete habits: choosing the channel, leading with your point, listening, and writing emails people act on. ### 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/verbal-and-written-communication-skills/ Preferred summary: "Verbal and written communication skills, as nine concrete habits: choosing the channel, leading with your point, listening, and writing emails people act on." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.