Oral Communication in Context | Types of Speech Styles

Who among you here finds it hard to understand speech styles? If you are still confuse about this topic in Oral Communication in context, you are in the right page. Today, I’m going to focus in explaining speech styles with various examples real life conversation. I hope you’ll take note some important details that you will learn from here.  Let’s get started.

Context is one of the natures of communication. The environment or the situation where communication occurs has direct relation to speech styles. There are actually five speech styles. We have intimate, casual, consultative, formal and frozen.

1.Intimate– This style is private, which occurs between or among close family members or intimate individuals. The language used in this style may no be shared or public.

Example: Proposing your love to your long time partner

2. Casual– This style is common among peers and friends. Jargon, slang, street language, gay language or vulgar words are used in this style. This what you usually use in your daily conversations.

Example: Talking about NBA finals with your friends

3. Consultative– This style is the standard one. Professional or mutually acceptable language is a must in this style. Most of the time one person is superior here.

Example: Students asking her teachers about the requirements in the recent project.

4. Formal– This style is used in formal settings. Unlike the consultative style, this is one way. Think of all the formal events that you have attended.  All of those require formal conversation.

Example: Reading news reports, delivering a speech

5. Frozen– This style is “frozen” in time and remains unchanged. It mostly occurs in ceremonies.

Example: Reading pledge of allegiance to the flag

These are the speech styles that we have.  We cannot say that we are only limited to one style for we have different contexts of conversation in our daily living.

I hope you learned something from this post.  Thank you so much for reading. Feel free to ask questions here.