# Verbal and Written Communication: Your Questions Answered Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/verbal-and-written-communication/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/verbal-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 What verbal and written communication really means at work, when to speak instead of writing, and how to evidence both on a resume - answered plainly. ## Key facts - Title: Verbal and Written Communication: Your Questions Answered - Category: Communication - Primary skill: Communication - Related skills: Building Confidence, Influence - Primary keyword: verbal and written communication - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/verbal-and-written-communication/ ## What this page covers - What verbal and written communication really means at work, when to speak instead of writing, and how to evidence both on a resume - answered plainly. - Practical guidance for verbal and written communication - How this topic connects to Communication ## Detailed explanation Most people meet this phrase in a job ad rather than a classroom, and read it with a small flicker of doubt about whether they qualify. In ordinary workplace use, verbal and written communication means speaking and writing: conversations, meetings, calls and presentations on one side; emails, reports, memos and chat messages on the other. Employers ask for both because the two modes fail in different ways, and almost nobody is equally good at each. The more useful question is not which is which, but which one a given situation calls for — and that has a simpler answer than the comparison charts suggest. ## What is the difference between verbal and written communication? Comparison sources converge on the same five contrasts, near-verbatim: speaking is fast, writing is slower; speaking leaves no record, writing is documented and revisable; speaking gets you feedback immediately, writing waits; you cannot unsay a sentence, but you can edit one before you send it; and speaking carries a higher risk of being misunderstood in the moment. Memorizing five axes is not much use. What helps is noticing that all five come from one variable: whether the other person is there in real time. Presence is what makes speech fast, unrecorded, immediately answerable and unrevisable, all at once. Absence is what makes writing slow, permanent, editable and quiet. Once you see that, you are not recalling a table — you are asking one question about the situation in front of you. ## Is written communication verbal or non-verbal? This one genuinely confuses people, and it is a recurring question on Quora, including a thread devoted to exactly this. The strict answer is that "verbal" means "with words," which makes writing a form of verbal communication and leaves only tone, gesture, posture and facial expression in the non-verbal category. Almost nobody uses the word that way at work. In job ads, on university career pages and in every resume guide, "verbal" means spoken and "written" means written. Both conventions are defensible, which is why the question keeps getting asked and never quite settles. For practical purposes the job-ad convention wins. When an employer writes "verbal and written communication," they mean can you speak well and can you write well. No interviewer will test you on the taxonomy. ## Why do job ads ask for both verbal and written communication skills? Because they are screening for something specific, not padding the posting. The University of Notre Dame runs dedicated Verbal/Written Communication pages for both undergraduate and graduate students, positioning it as a named career-readiness competency alongside the others employers assess. When a requirement shows up in university competency frameworks and job ads alike, it is being looked for. The pairing matters too. Being fluent in conversation but leaving a trail of unclear emails causes one kind of problem; writing beautifully while going silent in every meeting causes another. Employers name both because most work requires switching between them several times a day, often without thinking about it. ## How do I know whether to have a conversation or send an email? This is the question the search results answer worst. Workplace guides list situations — speak for brainstorming, negotiation and urgent decisions; write for announcements, policy changes and reports — but a list of examples does not help you with the situation you are actually in, which is never quite on the list. The rule underneath the examples: choose conversation when the exchange needs to go both ways. That covers building trust with someone new, anything sensitive, anything complicated enough that you will need to check whether you are being understood, negotiations, and problems you are solving together rather than reporting on. Choose writing when the exchange is mostly one direction: when the other person needs time to absorb or respond properly, when the content needs to exist as a record, or when you are simply passing on information. The most common mistake is using email for something sensitive because it feels less uncomfortable than saying it out loud. That choice usually costs more time than the conversation would have. ## What does good verbal communication look like at work? Less like eloquence than most people assume. In practice it is a handful of concrete behaviors: giving the person your full attention, [actually listening](/knowledge/communication/active-listening-in-communication/) rather than assembling your reply, watching how long you talk relative to everyone else, handling interruptions without either steamrolling or disappearing, and using your body and eye contact to show you are engaged. The content side is simpler still. Lead with your main point instead of building up to it. Be clear and direct. Be brief. Adapt to how the person in front of you prefers to receive things — some want the detail, some want the conclusion. Sources on this topic tend to fold tone, inflection, volume and expression into speech rather than treating them separately, and they are right to. Those elements are what let a spoken sentence carry humor, warmth or caution that the same sentence in writing simply would not. ## What does good written communication look like at work? Mostly discipline about the reader. Put the main message first rather than making someone read three paragraphs to find the request. Write a [subject line](/knowledge/communication/how-to-write-effective-emails/) that says what the email is about. Send it only to people who need it. Proofread before sending. Reply within a reasonable window, even if the reply is only to say when you will have a proper answer. Two things separate workplace writing from speaking. It is more formal — slang out, spelling and punctuation correct. And it is permanent in a way that unnerves people once they notice it: anything you write digitally can be forwarded, quoted and reread months later by someone who was never the intended reader, and deleting your copy does not undo that. The upside of writing, that it creates a record, is the same feature as its risk. ## I'm fine at writing but freeze up when I have to speak. What helps? You are describing the most common version of this gap. Writing can be done privately, revised, and abandoned halfway through; speaking happens once, in front of people. So plenty of people arrive at a job competent in one half and stuck in the other, and read "excellent verbal and written communication skills" as a verdict on them. What works is smaller than it sounds. Pick the [lowest-stakes version](/knowledge/confidence/how-to-be-more-confident/) of the thing and do that first: [one contribution in a meeting](/knowledge/professional-behaviors/how-to-speak-up/) where you already know the material, before any thought of presenting. Decide in advance what you will say and when you will say it, because the hardest part is the first sentence, not the rest. Expect to feel uncomfortable and go ahead anyway — the discomfort fades through repetition, not through waiting for it to lift. It is also worth checking your assumption. People are often wrong about which half is actually weak, and a quiet look at [which half is genuinely weaker](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) beats months spent fixing the wrong one. ## How do I show verbal and written communication skills on a resume? Not by claiming them. "Excellent communicator" is unfalsifiable, so recruiters skim past it. Indeed's guidance on putting written and verbal communication skills on a resume, echoed by ResumeWorded, is to describe things you actually did: led a weekly team meeting, presented findings to a client, explained a technical process to a non-technical colleague, wrote the reports, drafted the outreach emails. Attach a number and an outcome wherever one exists — Indeed's example format is something like the volume of prospecting emails written and the leads that followed. A described act can be checked; an adjective cannot. There is a quiet benefit to this exercise. Most people who doubt they have these skills find, once they start listing specific instances, that they have considerably more evidence than they expected. ## What makes both halves easier to get right Read those eight answers together and a pattern shows up: hardly any of the difficulty is about vocabulary or grammar. It is about judging the situation, being willing to speak into it, and getting the message to actually land. **Communication** is the skill doing most of the work here, and it is broader than the two modes in the keyword. It covers the choice between conversation and writing, the principles that hold in both — main point first, clear, brief, adapted to the receiver — plus the specifics of conversations, emails and meetings, and the harder moments: disagreeing, apologizing, giving feedback, handling someone who is angry. Treating it as one skill with modes, rather than two separate abilities, is what makes it improvable. **Building Confidence** is what the spoken half usually needs. The gap is rarely knowing what to say; it is saying it while your heart is going. Confidence here is built by doing — breaking the thing into steps small enough to actually attempt, practicing at each level before moving up, and accepting the discomfort instead of waiting it out. It is not a personality you either have or do not. **Influence** is what employers mean by "effective," though they rarely say so. A message that is clear but changes nothing has only half-worked. This skill is the preparation — understanding what is in it for the person listening — and the delivery: establishing rapport first, keeping it simple, using a concrete example, naming the drawbacks honestly rather than overselling, and following up afterward. It works without seniority, which is the version that matters early on. None of the three is fixed. They are behaviors, which is why they respond to practice. If you want a clearer read than self-assessment tends to give, the **free** Work Skills Test covers these three alongside the nine others the framework treats the same way — and [the ones you haven't considered](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) are often where the most is available. ## Where this leaves you You may already recognize some of this in how you work — the medium you reach for first, the meeting where you had something to say and let it pass. Working through eight questions about your own communication, honestly enough to notice which half you would rather avoid, is not a small thing. Most people never separate the two at all; they just conclude they are bad at communicating. Neither half is a fixed feature of you, and improving them does not require becoming a different sort of person. It means learning a set of behaviors that were never really taught. Which of them matters most for you right now depends on where you are heading, and that changes as you go — these skills tend to weigh more, not less, as the work gets more senior and more of it runs through other people. ## See where you actually stand The remaining step is finding out which parts are genuinely worth your attention. The Work Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills — about 7 minutes, twelve areas, no preparation required. It gives you a straight read on where you stand across all of them, including the ones this article did not touch, and shows which are likely to make the biggest difference to you now. You can take it privately, before mentioning to anyone that you are working on this. **[Take the skills test](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/)** *Free, about 7 minutes, and entirely at your own pace.* ## 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 verbal and written communication really means at work, when to speak instead of writing, and how to evidence both on a resume - answered plainly. ### 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/verbal-and-written-communication/ Preferred summary: "What verbal and written communication really means at work, when to speak instead of writing, and how to evidence both on a resume - answered plainly." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.