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Verbal vs Nonverbal

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Submitted By khearn
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Kasey Hearn
Take home paper #2 When we interact with people on a day to day basis, they get a sense of how we interact both verbally, and nonverbally. By changing our normal, everyday routine, even for a little bit, those people seem to notice. Over the past couple of weeks I broke two verbal rules, and two nonverbal rules. The end results were quite surprising to me. I had to think about what rules I wanted to break and who to break them with. I made everything sound sarcastic and changed the order of my sentences for the verbal rules. I stood really close to someone and didn’t use a lot of eye contact while speaking with another person for the nonverbal rules. I made everything sound sarcastic when I was talking to my mom. I thought that this would be the most funny rule to break with my mom because she usually takes everything so serious and can’t really tell when one is being sarcastic or not. When I got home, she asked me “how was your drive? How was traffic?” Let’s just say my three hour drive home on the weekends is usually never any fun. So I replied “oh it was just great. The traffic wasn’t that bad this time.” This is breaking the pragmatic rule, which deals with the implications or interpretations of statements. I have never really used sarcasm while talking to my mom, so I thought it would be interesting, which it was. She kind of just stared at me with a blank look on her face and replied with a somewhat confused “ok”. Eventually she asked me if I was being sarcastic so I said yes. I then proceeded to tell her that I was breaking a verbal rule, which are essentials rules we follow every day whether we realize it or not. I think it’s important to follow the pragmatic rule. Depending on who you’re talking to, they won’t be able to tell if you’re being sarcastic or not. When someone asks how your day is/was, we usually reply by saying its good. If our tone of voice is off by just a little, they might think we’re being sarcastic, even if we are not. When I was changing the order of my words in a sentence, I had to think about it before I spoke. Normally we don’t have to think about the way we speak because it just comes natural to us as human beings. I did this to a couple different people: my boyfriend, and one of my best friends, Daphanni. When my boyfriend asked me what I wanted for dinner, instead of saying “I don’t really care.” I said “care don’t I really.” He just looked at me and said alright kind of confused, but he still knew I meant “I don’t really care.” When Daphanni and I were having a conversation about which apartment we should move in to, I said to her “by like a lot mall like one the over the I” instead of “I like the one over by the mall a lot.” She just looked at me and started laughing really hard and asked what the heck was wrong with me. This is breaking the syntactic rule which governs the ordering of words within phrases. Like I had mentioned earlier, we do not usually think about what order we are going to put our words in, it just comes naturally. This rule was tricky to break. Neither my boyfriend nor Daphanni knew why I was talking to them like that. Imagine if we spoke to people like that every day. Would they think we are crazy? The syntactic rule is much more important to follow than the pragmatic rule. If we spoke with our words in different order all the time, people would eventually stop talking to us or think that something is wrong with us. Language has evolved over the years. There is a very slim chance that the “normal” way to talk would be by breaking the syntactic rule and nobody would think anything of it. Now let’s move on to the nonverbal rules that I broke. I found these a lot easier to break than the verbal rules. When I was still here in Vancouver, I thought it would be fun to break the use of personal space rule. I live with one of my mom’s friends whom I do not know all that well, but she is nice. As she was eating, I decided to get really close to her. I thought that because we do not know each other all that well, I wouldn’t get much of a reaction from her. I was surprised to see how she reacted when I broke that personal distance. I went from being anywhere from 1 ½ to 4 feet, to being 0 to 1 ½ feet. She just looks at me and laughs while she asks what I’m doing. I just look at her and tell her I do not know what she’s talking about while laughing just a little bit. She continuous to eat, and asks me if I want some of her food or something. She starts calling me silly, and I’m just laughing. After a couple of minutes, I started feeling a little uncomfortable, as I’m sure she did as well so I stopped and told her what exactly I was doing. Personally, I hate it when people I hardly even know invade that personal space. I have a very big “bubble” when it comes to interacting with people. Even if I’m standing in line at the grocery store it drives me insane when somebody is standing right behind me within my personal space. We spend most of our lives having a comfortable personal distance, or space, while interacting with others that when somebody breaks that distance we just feel very awkward and uncomfortable. Finally, for the second nonverbal rule I broke, I decided to change my eye contact while talking with my friend Ashley; who I know is really big on making eye contact while speaking and interacting with people. The study of eye behavior is called oculesics. I tried keeping my eyes down as much as I could, or I would look around while we were having a conversation. I tried not to laugh when she would get angry and frustrated with me, but I thought it was funny because she had no idea why I wasn’t making eye contact. They say eye contact is the most important role when communicating nonverbally. After doing this little so-called “experiment” with Ashley, I found that to be exceptionally true. After a while, before telling her why I wasn’t making eye contact with her, she started to wonder if everything was okay. Well of course nothing was wrong, I was just having fun with her. I asked her if at any point in our conversation if she thought I was lying, and she said a few times because there was hardly any eye contact being made. After she told me that, I proceeded to tell her why I wasn’t making eye contact. I told her that most of the time people think that not making eye contact means that they’re lying, which is true most of the time. Overall, I had fun breaking these nonverbal and verbal rules. I found that many people don’t realize that there are rules when we interact with each other, they just think that we are acting strange. Breaking the nonverbal rules was most challenging for me because I wondered if anyone would ever ask me why I was acting so strange. Between breaking the pragmatic rule, syntactic rule, personal space, and eye contact, I think the syntactic was easiest to point out. It’s not every day you hear people mixing up their words like that. I had the most fun when I was breaking the personal space between my mom’s friend Sherry and I. We both got a good laugh out of it and I think it even made her think twice about personal space while talking to people.

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