Communication
Electronic communication such as texting and emailing are not as effective as talking face-to-face with someone.
Premises/Data: Studies have showed that without face-to-face interaction, the lack of nonverbal cues, facial emotions prevents successful communication and hinders growth in a relationship. One study of preteens at a summer camp found that with just five days without electronics, the children showed improvement in there nonverbal communication skills (Uhls et al., 2014). We already know that non-verbal communication is a significant portion of communication, that when presented with a person face-to-face, as little as 7% of communication was verbal (Yaffe, 2011). Thus, these preteens were improving immediately their ability to comprehend what is in many cases the majority of communication messages.
Studies of virtual teams have found that people are even inclined to interpret email text for non-verbal messages. The problem with doing so is that we tend to use shorthand for this, for example interpreting direct communication as anger, when it might not be (Cheshin, Rafaeli & Bos, 2011). Furthermore, it has been found that it is more difficult to manage intercultural differences in electronic communications -- we struggle enough face-to-face, but there is a need for more contextual clues in intercultural communication, therefore we are even...
In essence, face-to-face communication allows us to express and interpret a fuller range of emotions and concepts. While we may have adapted to improve our ability to interpret electronic communications, it remains inferior to face-to-face.
Warrants: The first warrant is that we have all experienced both face-to-face and electronic communication. The concepts here would be foreign to someone who had never experienced electronic communication before. The second warrant is that the audience and speaker both believe the research that non-verbal communication is important, and that we understand how we have adapted to electronic communications. One of the unstated issues here is with respect to young children who were born into the era of electronic communications. Having never learned in a strictly face-to-face world, the findings might not hold for them, but the warrant here is that everybody believes that the premise holds across all cultures and even across all ages.
There is another warrant here as well, an important one, that everybody has some agreement about what "effective" means in the context of communication. It is a fairly vague word that could mean a lot of things. Normally, to evaluate effectiveness it is necessary to operationalize it, unless the speaker and…
