Is it Time to Replace Skill with Style? A Case for Studying Communication Style

Abstract

Three terms that scholars from Interpersonal Communication would be well-aware of are communication skills, communication competence, and communication style. Of the three streams, communication style seems inadequately studied and finds itself losing the scholarly attention. While there is very little recent literature in this stream, it looks promising to renew the research interest and contribute to building theory. This paper presents introductory literature on what is communication style, makes qualitative elaborations for scholar search results, and goes on to build a case for active study in this area. It was a surprising finding that this construct beats the other two in generational development, while on the contrary it finds itself diminishing.