Skills of Communication

There are three important ways of communicating in social work: listening, talking and writing.
    Listening skill in social work implies reading more than words from the client's conversation. The worker must absorb the client's ways of expressing hidden feelings. There is as much information in the silence, and implied body language as in the sound of the words. The clear and evident part of the client rhetoric is called the manifest content, and the understated, underlined, an implied connotation (usually where the meat of the conversation is) is the latent content.
    Talking skills, dialogue between the worker and the client has professional goals: information gathering and therapeutic change. Information gathering is to obtain factual and specific information in the interview. Therapeutic change's goal is to effect change in the functioning of the clients or their environment (Phillips, 2002).
      Writing skills is part of social worker's professional responsibilities. Good writing skills are required for maintaining written records, progress notes, referral letters, advocacy letters and journals.
    The basis for a clear communication relies on positive attitude and feelings from both the encoder and the decoder; awareness of and sensitivity to differences and similarities between both ends of the communication link (Brill, 2005); capacity of the client to use verbal and nonverbal communication, and ability of the worker to decode it; simple and plain language graded to the tempo and functioning level   of the client, and control of the ecosystem where the communication takes place (avoidance of interference).  

    Nonverbal communication – Is the basic primitive form of conveying information from one person to another without the use of words. Nonverbal communication is continuous, particularly in the initial stages of a relationship. Often a person says one thing but communicates something different through vocal intonation and body... [continues]

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