How to Communicate as a Graduate Student:
Ideas for Finding and Promoting One’s Self Within the Academy
“Delivery, I am telling you, is the one dominant factor in oratory. Without it, even the best orator cannot be of any account at all, while an average speaker equipped with this skill can often outdo the best orators.” — Cicero
Having a Purpose
Communication is, despite all the rigor placed around grammar, syntax, and vocabulary, a process derived from a purpose. You, as a communicator, have a perceived need to convey what you think or know to others. This is the essence of an intellectual community such as a university.
Scholars come together to conduct research and disseminate what they find to their peers. Appreciating the different purposes behind communication is crucial to maximizing your effectiveness as a scholar in one of those communities.
What is it you are trying to do when you communicate? Is it to convey information, pique someone’s interest in your own work, or simply start a conversation on the topic? Figuring out what it is you do — and perhaps more importantly what it is you want to do — when you communicate with peers is essential. All too often this process is left for granted.
As educated people, we know we can convey information if we need to, and even according to what our various departments come to expect. But the regurgitation of form is not the same thing as connecting through ideas. How is it that your ideas shape your presence as a scholar?
Forming an Identity
As much as having a purpose is necessary to effective and meaningful communication, it is only a reflection of your sense of self as a student and scholar. Having and maintaining an identity in this regard can be challenging. We are constantly asked to be objective, to conduct research without embellishment.
Within such a frame, it is understandable that one might find it difficult, or even bizarre, to try and view one’s self as unique and as such vital to academic discourse. But as much as method may require that we act along certain lines and present our thoughts according to certain scripts and standards, the ability to think for one’s self and through one’s passion regarding a topic is the life blood if intellectual inquiry.
What kind of scholar are you? How do you see yourself, or how to you want others to see you? The ideas you have are one thing. How you communicate them, that is the measure by which others — who are neither in your head nor privy to your ideas and profound thoughts — measure you.
The identity you envision for yourself and that you create through the communicative process is the scholar others perceive you as.
It is, and should be, a deliberate choice. Everything we do reflects who we are and who we want to be. The trick is to make that choice up front with yourself, to say that this is the type of thinker I want to be known as, and it is the one I will discipline myself to become.
Staying in one’s head is antithetical to scholarship, which thrives on thinkers disseminating what they think, believe, or know to others. But just as the scholastic process is one of openness and inclusivity, so too is the way in which you communicate who you are as one of those thinkers. It is easy to let the topic get ahead of us, letting it shape and mold how we think, or how we can think.
Identity and purpose are integral components of any communicative act, and all the more so within the confines of academia. Such is where ideas are cultivated, and where people go to discover and share them. Let you own identity as a scholar be just as much one of a communicator. At the end of the day, they are one and the same.
