Tag: Communication Pedagogy

The Courage to Be Seen Thinking: Speaking Through Fear

By Jill Szoo Wilson

“You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.”— Eleanor Roosevelt

I teach communication courses. Public Speaking is my mainstay. I also teach theatre, but communication has taken the front seat in my heart because I can see—clearly, daily—that the younger generation longs to become confident and competent in their ability to connect with other people. It isn’t a weakness in them, as many older adults like to say. It’s a weakness in us if we don’t equip them now to adapt their unique voices to their audiences.

My generation shared this desire when I was in school, but the landscape has changed since then. We lacked information; this generation is drowning in it. Growing up, our question was “What should I say?” Theirs is closer to “Who will hear me?” They are not unsure of what to speak about as much as they are unsure whether anyone is listening in a world where voices collide, compete, and vanish into the noise.

Yesterday, as this semester wraps up, I asked my class, “Has public speaking gotten easier for you?” I fully expected the usual yes. For a couple of decades, I’ve almost always heard that answer. But this time, about 80 percent said yes, and the other 20 percent said they are more terrified than ever.

I stopped everything and asked them why.

When a student feels afraid, I take it seriously. I feel a brief window of responsibility to help them leave stronger than they arrived, so they do not carry unnecessary fear into the rest of their lives.

One student said, “I felt fine on my first speech. But then I had to miss one, and on the next speech, I felt like I was behind. My chest tightened. I felt like I needed to escape—run out the door—but I knew I couldn’t. So I felt trapped. Feeling trapped, my fear grew and soon it was like I couldn’t see anymore. It’s like my mind escaped the room, but my body had to stay here.”

What a remarkable way to describe panic:
“It’s like my mind escaped the room, but my body had to stay here.”

I won’t unpack the whole conversation we had afterward, but I share this because it highlights how essential it is to equip young people with the communication tools necessary not just to present information, but to remain present within themselves when they feel afraid. Even though these students know each other well by now, even though there’s camaraderie and safety (even in disagreement), they still confessed thoughts like:

Do I sound stupid?
Are they judging me?
What if I fail?
What if I’m not good enough?
Why didn’t I rehearse more? Now it’s too late. I’m going to crash out.
I want to disappear.

So I told them that if they remember anything from this entire semester, please let it be this:

  1. There are always a hundred things happening at once in any moment. That’s life. It’s okay. You can’t control that part.
  2. What you can control is your preparation and your focus—look outward to the audience you’re giving something to, not inward toward fear.
  3. Adapt your message to your audience (using recency, locality, psychology, physiology, and economic factors), and speak from the heart as though you’re giving, not taking.

Fear lasts because communication touches identity. No teacher can remove that for another person; we can only help them learn how to stand in it.

Speaking always involves two kinds of work: thinking and being seen. When a student puts their ideas into words, they’re not only organizing their thoughts; they’re placing those thoughts into a space where others can evaluate them. That movement from inner reasoning to public expression activates the body just as powerfully as the mind. The student feels exposed because, in a very real sense, they are. Communication invites others to witness our thinking, and the body responds as though it must protect what has just been revealed. In this light, courage is not the absence of fear in communication, but the willingness to let one’s thinking be visible while learning to stay present in that exposure.

[C]ourage is not the absence of fear in communication, but the willingness to let one’s thinking be visible while learning to stay present in that exposure.

Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux demonstrated that the brain processes emotional threat more rapidly than conscious reasoning, producing instinctive reactions before the mind has time to interpret them (The Emotional Brain, 1996). When speaking, that instinct narrows attention and draws awareness inward. The student’s focus moves away from the audience and toward the self: What are they thinking of me saying this? In that moment, communication shifts from sharing ideas to guarding the identity that feels exposed. The body prepares to protect the thinker, even while the thinker is trying to speak.

To teach how to communicate through fear, then, is not simply to teach speaking. It’s to teach attention. Communication is an outward-facing act in which meaning is co-created between speaker and audience. The student is not performing for a passive group but participating in a shared moment of understanding. When fear sends the mind fleeing—“escaping the room while the body stays behind”—the pedagogical work is to help students return to that shared moment. This does not mean suppressing their anxiety, but retraining where they place their awareness. Instead of monitoring their own performance, they learn to notice the listeners they are addressing: how the audience responds, where clarity is needed, and where curiosity sparks. They begin to read the cues that help them stay present, such as facial expressions, body posture or stillness, eye contact, moments of confusion, or quiet signs of interest like leaning forward, nodding, or attentive silence. Attention becomes the bridge that allows the speaker to stay present long enough for communication to take shape.

You may wonder, Isn’t it scarier to notice the people in front of you? I would respond with another question: Isn’t it far more frightening to stand in front of others while constantly critiquing yourself in your own mind? When students shift their attention outward, they no longer face the audience alone. They begin to share the work of understanding with the people who are listening.

Educational theorist Parker Palmer writes that “we fear the live encounter” when speaking because we are culturally conditioned to treat knowledge as a possession to defend rather than a shared activity (The Courage to Teach, 1998). Many students come to communication believing that they must display what they know and protect it from critique. In that mindset, speaking becomes an act of performance: their ideas become something like personal property on a stage, vulnerable to judgment. Fear grows because the task feels like self-presentation rather than shared exploration. The speaker begins working to preserve an image—trying not to be wrong, trying not to be misunderstood—rather than working to illuminate a topic with others. Under this frame, communication is effort spent guarding the self rather than engaging with the subject or the audience.

Instead of treating knowledge as something we defend, we can help students see it as something we share.

A helpful metaphor I offer my students is to treat ideas like campfires. When students speak, they are tending a thought long enough for others to gather around it. The speaker’s work is to make that flame visible and to offer enough clarity for others to see by its light. The heat belongs to the concept, not to the student’s identity. Fear grows when a student imagines they themselves are being scrutinized or judged, as though they must withstand the fire. But when they learn to host others at the fire of an idea, the pressure shifts. They do not perform; they invite. Their task becomes to let the thought burn clearly enough for others to explore what its light reveals.

Hosting others at the fire of an idea becomes an act of generosity. Instead of guarding an idea to protect themselves, students learn to offer it for the sake of shared understanding. In this posture, ideas become contributions rather than possessions to defend. The goal moves toward clarity, shared reasoning, and insight that others can carry beyond the moment of speaking. The speaker intends to give something away: a perspective, a question, or an interpretation that helps others think more carefully.

This change in intention helps reshape the student’s internal experience. The audience is no longer a threat to self-image, but a group of learners who can benefit from the speaker’s effort. Fear loosens not because it vanishes, but because it now serves a different purpose. Anxiety becomes a form of care: a signal that the message matters. Instead of trying to perform without fault, the speaker begins to engage in the work of making ideas accessible to others by choosing clearer examples, inviting shared reasoning, and adjusting pace and language. The focus shifts from How do I look? to What might help them see this?

Such reframing is supported by Kenneth Burke’s foundational view of rhetoric as “the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols” (A Rhetoric of Motives, 1950). Burke’s definition shifts attention away from persuasion as winning agreement and toward communication as building shared understanding. He calls humans “beings that respond to symbols” because we think, interpret, and act through language. Words, therefore, do more than convey information. They invite people into a coordinated way of seeing. In this light, communication becomes cooperative work. As students begin to see their speeches as something they give rather than something by which they are measured, their attention turns toward building that shared understanding. Fear becomes manageable because their purpose becomes relational, and their speech becomes purposeful because it serves a common effort.

Anxiety, then, becomes not an obstacle but a cue that communication matters. It invites awareness rather than avoidance. As Susan Cain observes, “Fear is not a flaw; it’s a sign that something is worth doing” (Quiet, 2012). In a pedagogical context, this insight reveals fear as evidence of engagement, a marker that students are entering meaningful communicative work.

When communication is taught as outward-facing rather than defensive, students learn more than technique. They develop ethical habits of attentiveness, which are central to higher education and essential to public life. In an era marked by rapid exchange, polarized discourse, and performative speech, the capacity to direct attention outward becomes an act of civic responsibility. It equips students not merely to express themselves, but to interpret contexts, consider audiences, and contribute to understanding within complex communities.

Higher education, viewed through this lens, is not simply preparing speakers. It is cultivating citizens capable of relational inquiry. To help students remain present while speaking, to keep their “mind in the room” when fear urges retreat, is to equip them for the intellectual and ethical demands of adult life. They learn to see communication not as self-display but as participation in the shared labor of meaning-making.

This reframing transforms fear from a barrier into a catalyst. Students do not conquer visibility; they inhabit it. They learn to speak with others rather than at them and to stay present in the encounter rather than disappear into self-consciousness. In doing so, they acquire a communicative stance that extends well beyond the classroom, a stance defined not by performance but by presence.

When a student says, “It feels like my mind escaped the room,” communication education becomes a way of helping them return. We can teach them to stay present with others and to participate in meaning-making even when visibility feels risky. The work of public speaking becomes ongoing preparation for shared life: learning to offer ideas with clarity, to attend to others with care, and to keep the mind in the room where understanding can grow. This practice shapes how we show up in the world, cultivating attentiveness, generosity, and a readiness to learn in community with others.

Jill Szoo Wilson is an educator, speaker, and writer who teaches communication and theatre at the college level. Her writing explores the ethical and relational possibilities of speech in public life.

Further Reading

Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. University of California Press, 1969.
Cain, Susan. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. Crown, 2012.
LeDoux, Joseph. The Emotional Brain. Simon & Schuster, 1996.
Palmer, Parker J. The Courage to Teach. Jossey-Bass, 1998.
Rosenberg, Marshall. Nonviolent Communication. PuddleDancer Press, 2003.
Tannen, Deborah. The Argument Culture. Ballantine, 1999.

The Four Types of Listening: Understanding the Art of Attention

By Jill Szoo Wilson

“The most basic of all human needs is the need to understand and be understood. The best way to understand people is to listen to them.”
— Ralph G. Nichols, often called the father of listening research

Listening is the most underestimated of the communication arts. We are trained to write, to speak, to persuade, and to present, yet few are ever taught how to listen with intention. To listen well is not a passive act but an active form of attention that shapes meaning, relationship, and understanding. It’s the moment where perception meets interpretation and where human connection either succeeds or fails.

Communication theory defines this exchange as transactional, meaning that communication is not simply sent and received but created between people. As Adler, Rosenfeld, and Proctor describe, it is “the process of creating meaning through symbolic interaction.” Within this transactional exchange, listening becomes the point of highest concentration, where attention turns into understanding. Carl Rogers called it dangerous, precisely because true listening requires vulnerability; it asks us to suspend judgment and risk being changed by what we hear.

Listening, then, is not one behavior but many. Research by Kittie Watson, Larry Barker, and James Weaver III identifies four dominant listening orientations: time-focused, task-focused, relational, and analytical. Each reflects a distinct way of processing information and a different set of underlying values. This essay examines these four types of listening as a framework for understanding how we attend, interpret, and ultimately connect with one another.

Time-Focused Listening (Chronemic Listening)

Time-focused listening is driven by the belief that attention should move quickly, clearly, and without excess. It values brevity, structure, and the efficient use of minutes. In communication studies, this approach is linked to chronemics, the study of how time itself communicates meaning. Anthropologist Edward T. Hall observed that we “speak” through time as much as through language; we reveal respect, impatience, or control by how we manage it. To those who listen in a time-focused way, punctuality and precision are signals of competence. Listening, in this sense, is a tool for progress.

There are contexts in which this style works beautifully. In an emergency room, efficiency can save a life. In an executive meeting, it can save a company hour after hour of unproductive debate. A time-focused listener cuts through digression and demands the essential: What happened? What’s next? The conversation moves forward.

Yet the very strength of this style can also be its undoing. When efficiency becomes the highest good, conversation risks losing its depth. Meaning is trimmed, edited, and sometimes distorted in the rush to move forward. A dialogue that might have opened into understanding ends the moment it becomes inconvenient. The drive to stay on schedule can flatten nuance and quiet emotion, both of which need more time than the time-focused listener is willing to allow.

Chronemic listening reminds us that time is both a boundary and a message. The length of a pause, the patience of silence, and the willingness to let another person finish communicate as powerfully as the words being used. The discipline of listening does not reject efficiency, but it resists hurry. To listen well is to know when time serves clarity and when it threatens understanding. The best listeners master both.

Most people do not choose their listening style any more than they choose their accent. It develops quietly, shaped by what life has required of them. A nurse learns to listen for urgency. A parent learns to listen for need. An executive learns to listen for solutions. Over time, those habits start to feel like personality, when in fact they are responses to circumstance. Yet habits can shift. Once a person becomes aware of how they listen, they begin to notice the moments when that habit no longer serves them. They begin to recognize what once went unnoticed — the pause that deserves patience, and the silence that carries meaning — and in that awareness, the act of listening becomes less about efficiency and more about presence.

Behaviors you might observe:

  • Interrupts or redirects when conversation feels too slow or repetitive
  • Prefers summaries, timelines, and concise explanations
  • Checks the time or shifts body posture when discussions run long
  • Emphasizes deadlines and next steps over reflection
  • Speaks in short, efficient bursts rather than elaborating

Literary Reflections:

  • In Hamlet, impatience with words that circle without arriving at meaning captures the time-focused listener’s need for progress.
  • Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants turns brevity into both virtue and limitation; its spare dialogue mirrors the efficiency and avoidance of this style.
  • The clipped exchanges in Beckett’s Endgame reveal how the desire to finish speaking can become indistinguishable from despair.

Task-Focused Listening (Action-Oriented Listening)

Task-focused listening approaches communication as a means to an end. It listens for action, not for feeling, and measures success by what gets done rather than what gets understood. Communication scholars often describe this as action-oriented listening because it privileges the completion of tasks over the exploration of emotions. Its central question is simple: What are the steps?

This listening style is common in professional and technical environments where precision matters. Engineers, coaches, and project managers often exemplify it. They listen for data, instructions, and solutions. They want structure, not story. The speaker who wanders into emotion or ambiguity risks losing their attention, not because they lack empathy, but because their focus has already shifted to implementation.

There is an undeniable efficiency in this approach. It brings order to complex projects and gives structure to communication. Teams stay aligned, and goals become measurable. A task-focused listener reduces confusion and promotes accountability, turning discussion into direction. Meetings that might once have drifted end with decisions. In a culture that prizes productivity, this kind of clarity can feel like mastery, the mark of someone who not only listens but delivers.

Yet the strength of this style can slip into excess. When listening becomes purely instrumental, every exchange is measured by its outcome. People start to feel like problems to be solved rather than voices to be heard. A colleague seeking understanding may receive a solution instead. A partner expressing worry may be met with advice. The task-focused listener hears information but misses emotion, and what is efficient begins to feel detached.

Good communicators learn to adjust. They sense when a conversation needs movement and when it needs mercy. In a crisis, this style can bring direction and calm. In a moment of fear or doubt, it can create distance. The art lies in knowing the difference. True listening asks for patience, for the courage to stay with what is unresolved. The task-focused listener grows when they learn that not every question requires an answer, and not every silence demands a plan. Sometimes the most skillful action is to wait, to hear fully, and to let meaning unfold on its own.

Behaviors you might observe:

  • Asks solution-driven questions such as “What do we need to do?”
  • Takes notes or creates lists while others are still talking
  • Moves quickly from discussion to implementation
  • Rephrases statements into actions or instructions
  • Struggles to remain engaged when the conversation turns emotional or abstract

Literary Reflections:

  • In Kafka’s The Trial, listening collapses into procedure. Every response is measured against a task no one fully understands.
  • George and Lennie in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men illustrate how pragmatic listening preserves survival but erodes tenderness.
  • Camus’ The Stranger exposes the sterility of communication reduced to function, where understanding gives way to process.

Relational Listening (People-Oriented Listening)

Relational listening is the art of hearing people, not just words. It centers on empathy, emotional nuance, and the subtle cues that reveal what someone truly means. Communication scholars describe this as people-oriented listening because it prioritizes understanding the person behind the message rather than the message alone. The relational listener’s guiding question is not What happened? or What should I do? but How does this person feel?

Where time-focused and task-focused listeners aim for progress, relational listeners aim for connection. Their attention is tuned to tone, pacing, pauses, and body language — the invisible grammar of emotion. They notice when a voice tightens, when silence stretches too long, or when laughter masks discomfort. To them, listening is a form of care. They listen to affirm dignity, create safety, and remind others that their experience matters.

The strength of this style lies in its generosity. When people feel heard, they relax into honesty. When they sense genuine empathy, they risk saying more. In counseling, teaching, and ministry, relational listening is often the bridge that allows difficult truths to surface. The listener’s patience becomes a kind of hospitality, a quiet invitation that says, Go ahead, and finish your thought.

Even empathy needs structure. When relational listening stretches too far, compassion can turn into depletion. The listener begins to carry emotions that do not belong to them, mistaking absorption for understanding. Out of kindness, they may soften hard truths or avoid conflict altogether. What begins as care can quietly become a burden. Over time, the constant pull to soothe and affirm leaves the listener weary. True empathy does not require taking on another person’s pain; it asks for presence without possession. Skilled relational listeners learn to stay open without being overtaken.

To listen relationally is to recognize that communication is not merely an exchange of information but an encounter between human lives. It transforms listening from a polite gesture into a moral act that honors both the speaker’s story and the listener’s limits.

Behaviors you might observe:

  • Maintains gentle eye contact and open posture
  • Uses verbal affirmations such as “I understand” or “That sounds difficult”
  • Allows silence to stretch without rushing to fill it
  • Mirrors emotion through tone or facial expression
  • Notices changes in energy, mood, or body language and adjusts response accordingly

Literary Reflections:

  • In Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, characters listen less to words than to the emotional current beneath them. Connection emerges in the space between sentences.
  • Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard depicts the fatigue of constant empathy; everyone listens, yet no one is truly heard.
  • In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet’s insight arises from learning to listen without projection. Misunderstanding gives way to recognition.

Analytical Listening (Content-Oriented Listening)

Analytical listening seeks to understand before it judges. It is a methodical and often contemplative way of attending to information. Communication researchers describe this as content-oriented listening because it focuses on ideas, evidence, and reasoning rather than emotion or efficiency. The analytical listener’s question is, What is true here, and how do I know?

This orientation thrives in environments that prize depth of thought such as universities, courtrooms, laboratories, and newsrooms. Analytical listeners are comfortable with ambiguity. They prefer complexity to certainty and are willing to hold competing ideas in tension until clarity emerges. Their patience for uncertainty can feel unsettling to those who want quick answers, yet this restraint is precisely what allows analysis to deepen understanding.

Analytical listeners excel in situations that demand discernment. They attend to structure, logic, and supporting detail. They look for patterns in language, for assumptions buried inside arguments, and for evidence that distinguishes opinion from fact. They are often the ones who pause before responding, not because they are disengaged, but because they are still listening, not only to the speaker but to their own developing understanding.

Still, this style carries its own risks. The analytical listener may appear detached or overly cerebral. In a commitment to objectivity, they can miss the emotional undercurrents that shape how meaning is received. A purely analytical approach to human conversation can flatten what should be relational. Understanding the content of a message is not the same as understanding its impact.

The discipline of analytical listening reminds us that comprehension and empathy are not opposites but partners. Thought without empathy becomes sterile; empathy without thought becomes unmoored. The most effective communicators are those who can think critically without ceasing to care.

Behaviors you might observe:

  • Asks clarifying or probing questions before responding
  • Takes time to process before speaking
  • Analyzes the logic or structure of what is being said
  • References evidence, examples, or inconsistencies in arguments
  • Appears calm or neutral even during emotionally charged discussions

Literary Reflections:

  • In Twelve Angry Men, Juror Eight models analytical listening as moral discipline, withholding judgment until comprehension is complete.
  • T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock portrays a mind so devoted to precision that it loses the ability to act.
  • Orwell’s 1984 presents analytical listening under constraint, where discernment itself becomes an act of rebellion.

Conclusion

Listening represents a continuum of attentional choice. Each orientation, time-focused, task-focused, relational, and analytical, highlights a distinct way of organizing perception and constructing meaning. Together, they illustrate how listeners shape understanding through focus, habit, and value.

Within the transactional model of communication, meaning arises through interaction. Listener and speaker participate equally in that exchange, shaping one another’s interpretations as the dialogue unfolds. Listening functions as the center of communication, the place where awareness becomes understanding and understanding becomes relationship.

To study listening is to study connection itself. Every exchange of attention expands the shared field of meaning between people, allowing communication to do what it was designed to do: create understanding that endures beyond words.

Further Reading

Adler, Ronald B., Lawrence B. Rosenfeld, and Russell F. Proctor II. Interplay: The Process of Interpersonal Communication. Oxford University Press, 2018.

Floyd, Kory. Interpersonal Communication. McGraw-Hill, 2011.

Hall, Edward T. The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time. Anchor Books, 1983.

Nichols, Ralph G., and Leonard A. Stevens. Are You Listening? McGraw-Hill, 1957.

Rogers, Carl, and Richard E. Farson. Active Listening. University of Chicago Industrial Relations Center, 1957.

Watson, Kittie W., Larry L. Barker, and James B. Weaver III. Listening Styles Profile. Spectra, 1995.

This essay was originally posted on my Jill Szoo Wilson Substack.

The Garden Between Us: On the Moral Work of Communication

By Jill Szoo Wilson

No Kings protests. Israel and Palestine peace talks. The Mayoral debate in New York City. And somewhere between those headlines, a viral argument about whether pumpkin spice season begins too early.

What a week!

During a class discussion on the topic of ethical communication, one of my students made an observation that stayed with me:

“Sometimes I walk away from a conversation with one of my friends or family members, and I think they really understood what I was saying. Then, like a week later, I’ll see something they post on social media and realize — whoa — we weren’t even in the same universe. How do you know if someone actually gets what you’re saying?”

There was real frustration in her voice as she grappled intellectually and emotionally with how to translate effective communication skills from the classroom to real-world relationships and conversations that truly matter to her.

Her question strikes at the heart of communication theory itself. Every major model—from Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver’s early work in information theory to the later transactional and constructivist frameworks—grapples with the same problem she voiced: how does meaning move from one mind to another without distortion? Communication is never just about speaking clearly; it’s about whether understanding travels intact from one mind to another. The first modern attempt to diagram that process came in 1948, when two Bell Labs researchers sought to solve a practical problem—how to transmit information efficiently over telephone lines—and ended up shaping a foundation for how we consider human connection today.

Section I: The Shannon–Weaver Model — Communication as Transmission

When Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver introduced their model of communication in 1948, they weren’t thinking about classrooms or conversations; they were thinking about telephones. Shannon, a mathematician at Bell Labs, was studying how to send messages through electrical circuits with the least amount of interference. His goal was precision: a system in which information could be transmitted, received, and decoded without distortion.

In its simplest form, the Shannon–Weaver Model outlines five key components: a sender, a message, a channel, noise, and a receiver. Later versions added feedback to acknowledge that communication rarely ends at reception; it loops back through response. The model’s simplicity made it foundational for how we understand all forms of message exchange, from radio broadcasts to human dialogue.

Imagine you’re explaining something important to a friend. You form the thought (sender), put it into words (message), speak aloud (channel), and hope it reaches the listener (receiver). Noise—anything from background chatter to the friend’s assumptions or daydreams—can distort what you mean. Feedback, whether a nod or a question, helps you gauge whether your message landed.

Now imagine trying to apologize to someone you care about after a painful misunderstanding. You’ve rehearsed the conversation for days, turning phrases over in your mind, searching for the language that might soften what was said. When the moment finally comes, you speak from the heart, but your voice trembles. You mean to say “I’m sorry,” yet what they hear is “I’m still defending myself.” You reach out, and somehow they retreat. The words are correct, but the meaning collapses somewhere between intent and reception.

The Shannon–Weaver Model helps us see the anatomy of that collapse. The “noise” isn’t external static or interference, but the invisible internal weight of emotion, memory, and assumption. Even when a message is spoken clearly, those unseen forces can bend it out of shape. The model reminds us that successful communication isn’t about flawless delivery but about whether understanding survives the distance between two people.

The model is practical but limited: it shows how messages move, not how meaning emerges. Shannon and Weaver understood communication as a linear transfer of data; humans experience it as something far more collaborative — a process of interpretation, empathy, and response.

This distinction is important because even a perfectly transmitted message can still fail to communicate meaning. As my student asked, “How do you know if someone actually gets what you’re saying?” According to Shannon and Weaver, you’d simply confirm that the message was received and decoded. But real understanding, as anyone who has been misunderstood knows, is not that simple. It requires shared context, empathy, and attention to nuance. These are elements that don’t fit neatly into a circuit diagram.

The Shannon–Weaver Model gives us a starting point: communication as transmission. Yet it leaves us asking what happens beyond transmission, where ideas meet perception. To explore that terrain, we turn to one of the most enduring frameworks in contemporary communication: Barnlund’s Transactional Model.

Section II: Barnlund’s Transactional Model — Communication as Co-Creation

By the 1970s, communication theorist Dean Barnlund proposed a shift so profound that it still reshapes how we teach the subject today. Where Shannon and Weaver treated communication as a line of transmission, Barnlund imagined something circular, alive, and reciprocal. He argued that the exchange itself was not an assembly line of words moving from one mind to another but a living process that creates a shared narrative between people.

Barnlund’s Transactional Model reimagined this process not as a one-way transfer of information but as a dynamic act of co-creation. Every conversation, he suggested, is an event that exists only in the moment it happens, built, revised, and reshaped by both participants at once. The act of meaning-making is mutual. Each person’s interpretation alters the message itself. In this way, communication becomes less about accuracy and more about emergence.

To help students see what this looks like, I often begin with an exercise that never fails to surprise them. I pair students and ask them to tell a simple story from their weekend. The first partner speaks for thirty seconds while the other listens silently, offering no reaction or feedback. Then they switch. When we debrief, most describe the silence as unsettling, even cold. “I felt like I was boring him or maybe he wasn’t even listening,” one student said. The second round changes everything. This time, listeners can nod, smile, or ask questions. The conversation immediately warms. Laughter enters the room. Meaning deepens. What changed wasn’t the content of the stories but the shared construction of them. Each speaker began shaping their language in response to the listener’s cues. Together, they built a small, co-authored moment of understanding.

If Shannon and Weaver gave us the map of communication, Barnlund taught us how to read the terrain. His model asks us to notice the pauses, gestures, silences, and emotional undercurrents that live beneath language. Meaning, he argued, is not simply sent; it is negotiated, felt, and co-authored.

Where Shannon and Weaver saw a sender and receiver, Barnlund saw communicators engaged in simultaneous exchange. Each person is both sender and receiver at once, continually encoding, decoding, and interpreting within a shared field of experience. Communication, in this view, is about negotiating reality together.

Section III: From Transmission to Transformation — Understanding the Difference

The Shannon-Weaver model teaches how to speak clearly, while Barnlund’s model teaches why clarity is sometimes not enough. One focuses on information; the other on interpretation. One aims for precision; the other for understanding.

Learning Shannon-Weaver fosters autonomy. It helps us become aware of purpose, audience, and structure. Learning Barnlund brings humility. It reminds us that even the most carefully crafted message depends on another person’s frame of meaning. There is comfort in realizing this: sometimes we can speak with care and still not be understood. Our responsibility is to communicate as clearly and honestly as we can, and then to accept the outcome rather than trying to control it. There is strength in understanding that we do not have to be fully understood to be worthy of speaking.

A simple exercise illustrates the difference. Imagine describing an image while someone, turned away, tries to draw it based only on your words. The first attempt, with no questions allowed, is pure Shannon-Weaver transmission. The drawing will likely be efficient but distorted. Now imagine trying again with questions and clarifications. The process slows, but understanding grows. Meaning, like art, becomes clearer when it is co-created.

Think of the miscommunication between Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. For most of the novel, each interprets the other through the noise of pride, prejudice, and social expectation. Darcy’s words are technically clear—his first proposal is grammatical perfection—but his tone, timing, and failure to consider Elizabeth’s perspective distort the message beyond recognition. It takes a long series of feedback loops—letters, revelations, and changed behavior—for meaning to realign with intent. Only when both listen with humility rather than defensiveness does understanding emerge. Austen’s scene endures because it dramatizes the very truth Barnlund uncovered: communication becomes transformative only when both parties risk vulnerability and mutual perception.

The shift from transmission to creation mirrors a moral one. To communicate ethically is to recognize that every exchange plants something between people: a seed that can grow into trust or misunderstanding, grace or distance. The philosopher Martin Buber, writing in 1923 in I and Thou, taught that real life unfolds through genuine encounter. “All real living is meeting,” he wrote, describing how we come fully alive when we engage another person not as an object to persuade but as a presence to meet. Every tone of voice and every moment of attention becomes soil for what will take root between us. Our words are seeds, and the spaces we tend together become the garden we live in.

That realization gives us a kind of power that is both humbling and hopeful. It means that everyday choices in conversation — things like listening fully, asking questions, or pausing before reacting — can repair trust where there was once distance. Communication becomes not just a skill but a responsibility: the way we decide, moment by moment, what kind of relationships and communities we will build.

My student’s question still lingers: How do you know if someone actually gets what you’re saying? Understanding grows each time we listen with patience and speak with care. It lives in the meeting itself, in the ongoing work of tending meaning between people. When we stay present to one another, communication becomes the living art of truly meeting another human being.

For more essays by Jill Szoo Wilson on Substack, click here!

Persuasion Vs. Manipulation

By Jill Szoo Wilson

Prologue

This semester, our incoming group of budding communicators is particularly cantankerous, in the best possible way. In twenty years of teaching, I’ve never been challenged more on the details of what I teach. Many professors lament this sort of thing, but for me, it’s pure fun. I love a good debate and always welcome the chance to sharpen my own focus as a teacher and a communicator.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been exploring argumentation, debate, and persuasion. One of our liveliest discussions centered on a deceptively simple question: What is the difference between persuasion and manipulation?

This essay is my answer.

The Human Impulse to Persuade

Every one of us has tried, at some point, to change another person’s mind. My first experiments with persuasion began on the front lawn of my grandparents’ house with my cousin, who was two years older than me. Everything was fair game to become a competition. “I’ll race you to the car!” “I can go higher on the swing than you can!”

When speed and strength were involved, he almost always won. So I learned early to change tactics. Once he could outrun me, I turned to logic: “Since I’m two years younger than you, I should get a ten-second head start.” This rarely worked, but I admired the sound of my own reasoning. When our contests moved to an even playing field—say, over the last red popsicle—I shifted to rhetorical flair. If he grabbed red and I got orange, I would praise my orange with the conviction of a first-grade philosopher: “Orange popsicles taste sweeter, juicier, and more like the real fruit. Red popsicles don’t taste like real cherries.” What I really wanted, of course, was for him to reconsider, to see orange as the better flavor and trade with me. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t.

Even then, I was learning something that Aristotle would later help me understand more clearly: persuasion is not a learned trick but a human instinct. From childhood onward, we use language to shape the world to our liking, to win an argument, to soften a disagreement, or to make another person see as we see. Persuasion begins as play, but it quickly becomes the architecture of human connection.

Persuasion is, at its heart, an effort to reach beyond oneself, to connect what we know with what another might come to understand. It takes shape in the meeting of reason and desire, where logic provides structure and emotion gives movement. When both work together, persuasion becomes not a contest of wills but a bridge of understanding.

Yet persuasion is never a neutral act. Every effort to influence another person carries both risk and possibility: the risk of distortion and the possibility of connection. To persuade well is not to overpower but to invite, not to dominate but to guide. Within that same impulse lies a shadow side, which is the temptation to control rather than to clarify, or engineer an agreement rather than earn it. The real difference between argumentation and manipulation begins long before the words are spoken. It begins with intent.

Communication scholars have long explored how influence operates, how ideas move from one person or group to another, and how that movement may shift from open persuasion into covert control.

Long before communication became a field of study, persuasion occupied a central place in public life. In ancient Greece, it was regarded as essential to citizenship, the means by which ideas could be tested, debated, and defended in the public square. In Rhetoric, Aristotle defined rhetoric as “the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.” Through this definition, he presented persuasion as a disciplined process of inquiry, a practice grounded in observation and judgment rather than performance. It was, at its core, an intellectual art that sought to uncover the most fitting means of conveying truth to an audience capable of reason.

Embedded within this framework is an assumption that continues to shape the study of communication: persuasion, when practiced ethically, engages the whole person. For Aristotle, effective persuasion balanced logos, pathos, and ethos—reason, emotion, and character—so that intellect and feeling could work together toward understanding. Ethical persuasion, therefore, requires an awareness of the audience’s capacity for discernment and a respect for the autonomy of that discernment. To persuade is not to impose our will upon another but to participate in a shared act of reasoning.

Modern communication theory continues to explore this relationship between persuasion and ethics. Whether in classrooms, politics, or media, the complexity of contemporary discourse often obscures the distinction between persuasion and manipulation. The methods of influence have evolved, yet the moral question remains: how can a communicator move others toward action without distorting their capacity for choice?

Alan H. Monroe’s Motivated Sequence, developed at Purdue University in the 1930s, offers one of the most enduring frameworks for organizing persuasive discourse. Built on principles of human reasoning and motivation, the sequence follows five stages—Attention, Need, Satisfaction, Visualization, and Action—each corresponding to a psychological movement in the listener. The communicator first gains attention by presenting something vivid, relevant, or surprising enough to make the audience listen. The second step, need, identifies a problem or condition that requires change, prompting the audience to recognize its significance. In satisfaction, the speaker proposes a clear and reasonable solution to that need. Visualization invites the audience to imagine the outcome of adopting or rejecting the proposed solution, giving emotional dimension to the argument. Finally, action calls for a specific response that translates conviction into behavior.

Monroe’s structure endures because it mirrors the natural progression of human decision-making: perception, comprehension, evaluation, and response. Each stage engages both logic and emotion, appealing simultaneously to logos and pathos, while the speaker’s credibility, or ethos, sustains trust throughout the process. When practiced with integrity, the sequence creates a dialogue rather than a performance, guiding speaker and listener toward shared understanding. It treats persuasion as a cooperative act in which reasoning and imagination work together to illuminate truth and inspire responsible choice.

Manipulation breaks the dialogue. It turns communication into control, replacing mutual understanding with managed response. The difference between the two lies in motive. Argumentation seeks truth through participation, trusting that others can reason freely. Manipulation, by contrast, treats truth as secondary to outcome. It uses fragments of truth to steer perception toward a predetermined goal.

Understanding how argumentation fosters participation requires a closer look at how Monroe’s model translates the ethics of persuasion into structure.

Section I: Persuasion as Co-Authorship — Monroe’s Motivated Sequence

Monroe’s Motivated Sequence demonstrates that persuasion, at its best, is not an act of domination but of collaboration. As noted above, its five stages — Attention, Need, Satisfaction, Visualization, and Action — form more than a sequence of rhetorical moves; they map the cognitive and emotional rhythm through which conviction takes shape. Each step invites the audience to participate in discovery. Attention asks the listener to notice. Need prompts recognition of a problem that requires collective reasoning. Satisfaction proposes a solution, but it is the listener’s agreement that grants it coherence. Visualization engages imagination, allowing both speaker and audience to see the consequences of choice. Action completes the process, translating understanding into movement.

This progression reveals persuasion as an act of shared authorship. Meaning is not imposed but constructed in the space between communicator and audience. Monroe emphasized that persuasion “must be based upon a sincere desire to help the audience,” grounding the entire model in ethical intent (Principles and Types of Speech, 1935). The communicator’s purpose is to awaken reflection, not to engineer consent. When used with integrity, Monroe’s framework affirms the listener’s agency: it assumes that choice, not compliance, is the ultimate measure of success.

Manipulation, however, imitates this process while emptying it of reciprocity. It copies the outward form of persuasion — capturing attention, naming a need, proposing a solution — but removes the listener’s genuine role in reasoning. To clarify this distinction:

  • It imitates structure but removes exchange. Manipulation retains the stages of persuasion but strips them of dialogue. The communicator determines the desired outcome and designs the message to lead the audience there without true participation.
  • It fabricates or inflates need. Ethical persuasion identifies real problems that can be solved through evidence and reasoning; manipulation often creates or exaggerates problems to generate urgency or fear.
  • It converts reasoning into reaction. By heightening consequences and emotional charge, manipulation pressures the listener to respond quickly rather than reflect critically.
  • It transforms dialogue into design. What was once a conversation becomes a calculated system of cues meant to elicit compliance. The audience ceases to be a co-author and becomes a variable in an engineered outcome.
  • It achieves effect without understanding. Manipulation may look successful because it produces agreement or action, yet its success is hollow. True persuasion results in shared comprehension; manipulation stops at behavior.

In each of these distortions, manipulation replaces conversation with control. What appears persuasive achieves only reaction, not understanding.

This ethical structure finds its counterpart in how messages are processed. The next major framework, developed by Richard E. Petty and John T. Cacioppo, explores the psychology of reception, which is how audiences move between reflection and reaction.

Section II: The Elaboration Likelihood Model — Depth vs. Deception

Richard E. Petty and John T. Cacioppo’s Elaboration Likelihood Model of Persuasion (1986) provides one of the clearest distinctions between ethical argumentation and manipulation. The model identifies two routes to persuasion: the central route, which involves careful and thoughtful consideration of arguments, and the peripheral route, which relies on superficial cues such as attractiveness, status, or emotional appeal.

Argumentation engages the central route. It requires the audience to evaluate claims, assess evidence, and integrate the message into their existing framework of understanding. Manipulation, conversely, depends on the peripheral route, using distraction and affect to short-circuit deliberation. Political slogans, viral advertising, and disinformation campaigns often thrive in this space, much like the rapid, emotionally charged content cycles of TikTok, where engagement is driven less by reflection than by immediacy of response. Such environments reward reaction over reasoning, conditioning audiences to feel before they think.

Petty and Cacioppo note that when motivation and ability to process information are high, persuasion through the central route produces “more enduring attitude change” (Communication and Persuasion, 1986). Manipulative messages may succeed in the short term, but they erode trust over time and weaken the habits of reflection on which a democratic society depends. The communicator’s ethical duty, therefore, is to foster conditions where central processing can occur; to create clarity rather than confusion and engagement rather than reflex.

Case Study: Depth vs. Surface in Persuasion

A marketing study conducted in the 2010s applied the Elaboration Likelihood Model to a national outdoor-gear campaign that ran two versions of the same advertisement. The first appeared in specialist magazines devoted to hiking and mountaineering. It featured detailed product specifications, expert testimonials, and comparisons grounded in evidence—a clear appeal to the central route of persuasion. The second appeared in general-interest magazines, replacing technical content with striking imagery and celebrity endorsement, relying instead on the peripheral route.

The results revealed a familiar but instructive pattern. Readers of the specialist publications, who were highly motivated and able to evaluate the arguments, demonstrated deeper and longer-lasting attitude change. They could articulate why they preferred the product and were more likely to repurchase it later. Readers of the general-interest magazines responded quickly to the aesthetic and emotional appeal, but their enthusiasm faded once the novelty passed.

This contrast captures the heart of Petty and Cacioppo’s model: the central route yields durable conviction because it engages thought, whereas the peripheral route yields temporary compliance because it stimulates reaction. In an attention economy dominated by visual saturation and emotional immediacy, the study reminds communicators that persuasion built on understanding endures longer than persuasion built on impulse.

Even when persuasion engages reason, it must still contend with belief. No argument reaches a neutral audience; every listener carries a network of convictions, loyalties, and prior judgments that shape how information is received. The next framework, Social Judgment Theory, explains this terrain by examining how attitudes form zones of acceptance and rejection, and how communicators must navigate them to foster genuine understanding.

Section III: Social Judgment Theory — The Battleground of Belief

Social Judgment Theory, developed by Muzafer Sherif and Carl Hovland in the 1960s, offers one of the most psychologically elegant explanations for how persuasion interacts with belief. It begins with a simple observation: people do not approach new ideas as blank slates. Every listener carries an existing position—an anchor—against which all messages are measured. Around that anchor lie three zones of response: a latitude of acceptance, where ideas feel familiar or reasonable; a latitude of rejection, where they feel threatening or extreme; and a latitude of noncommitment, where uncertainty allows openness to change.

Persuasion succeeds when a message lands within or near the listener’s latitude of acceptance, inviting reflection and gradual movement toward a new position. When a message falls inside the latitude of rejection, it provokes resistance instead. Listeners perceive the idea as more extreme than it is—a contrast effect—and often shift their anchor even farther away, strengthening their opposition. This reaction, known as the boomerang effect, reveals that attempts to force agreement can harden belief rather than soften it.

For example, when debates arise over faith and science, persuasion often fails because it ignores these psychological zones. A scientist who declares, “Religious belief is incompatible with rational thought,” instantly activates the listener’s latitude of rejection among believers. The message feels not educational but contemptuous. The same scientist might instead begin, “Both faith and science seek truth, though they ask different questions.” That framing shifts the discussion toward the latitude of acceptance, creating cognitive room for genuine dialogue.

Ethical persuasion recognizes these boundaries. It seeks proximity, not provocation. The communicator’s task is not to overthrow conviction but to build a bridge from what is known to what is possible. Manipulation, by contrast, weaponizes these boundaries. It deliberately aims for the latitude of rejection, exploiting anger, fear, and identity to provoke outrage. The result may look persuasive—crowds mobilized, posts shared, hashtags trending—but what spreads is emotion, not understanding.

The implications for modern discourse are profound. On social media, especially within algorithm-driven platforms like TikTok or X, messages that trigger contrast and boomerang effects are rewarded with visibility. Outrage becomes currency. Ethical communicators must therefore resist the temptation to escalate in tone or oversimplify in content. The goal is not to push harder but to reach closer and to frame ideas within the hearer’s capacity for reason and reflection.

Social Judgment Theory expands what Monroe’s Motivated Sequence and the Elaboration Likelihood Model begin to show: persuasion is most powerful when it honors belief rather than assaults it. To communicate ethically is to meet others where they are, trusting that understanding, not outrage, is the ground on which lasting change is built.

Section IV: The Ethics of Intention and Transparency

If the preceding theories reveal how persuasion functions, the question of why we persuade leads us into ethics. The moral center of communication lies not in form or method but in motive. Argumentation and manipulation may share the same tools—logic, emotion, and credibility—but they diverge in intent.

Argumentation is transparent. It seeks to clarify truth, even at the risk of disagreement. Manipulation is opaque. It obscures motive to secure compliance. The ethical communicator invites listeners into the reasoning process, granting them the freedom to evaluate and, if necessary, to refuse. The manipulator withholds context, conceals purpose, and treats the listener as a means to an end.

Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy captures this distinction: one must “act in such a way that you treat humanity… always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means.” Ethical persuasion honors the audience as capable of judgment. It respects their agency, trusts their discernment, and relies on the strength of truth rather than the fragility of control. Manipulation, by contrast, views listeners as instruments to be directed, data points to be optimized, or markets to be captured.

The most revealing marker of manipulation is concealment. Whether through selective framing, emotional overload, or false urgency, manipulation hides its motive. Argumentation does the opposite: it brings motive to light. To argue well is to trust that truth, once revealed, can persuade on its own merits.

Persuasion, then, is not merely a skill but a moral responsibility. To communicate ethically is to honor what makes us human: the ability to reason, to feel, and to choose freely between them. In an age saturated with messages competing for attention and allegiance, the task of the communicator is not only to be persuasive but to be honest. Language remains our most powerful instrument. It can heal, instruct, and inspire, but only when used with integrity can it fulfill its highest purpose: not to win, but to awaken.

In the end, the difference between persuasion and manipulation may not be so different from that childhood debate over the orange and red popsicles. I wanted my cousin to see things my way, but the best arguments were never the loudest; they were the ones that left room for him to decide for himself. Real persuasion still works that way. It trusts that others are capable of thought, taste, and choice. Whether we are children trading popsicles or adults trading ideas, the goal is the same: to reach understanding, not to win.

Read more by Jill Szoo Wilson on Substack.