Chapter 1 Communication: Essential Human Behavior 15Competent Communication Is
Appropriate and Effective
Lena Dunham stars in the HBO series Girls as Hannah, a twenty-
something in Brooklyn with writerly ambitions. Due to her self-
involvement, Hannah is not a particularly skilled communicator,
and one incident in the third season makes this abundantly clear.
Hannah attends the funeral of the editor who was helping her
publish a memoir—and ends up asking his widow to help connect
her to another publisher. Shocked at her timing, the widow asks
her to leave.
If you’ve ever laughed or cringed at someone else’s inappropriate
question or comment, you already understand that for communica-
tion to be competent it needs to be both effective and appropriate.
You would not speak to your grandmother in the same way you talk
to your friends; nor would a lawyer ask her husband to complete a task the same
way she would ask her office assistant. Competent, successful communicators
adjust their behavior to suit particular individuals and situations; the characters
in Girls do neither.
Appropriate Behavior
During his spring 2013 European tour, popular music star Justin Bieber visited
Amsterdam’s Anne Frank House, a popular museum dedicated to the legacy
of the World War II teenage diarist, Anne Frank. Frank’s family, and four
other Jewish friends, hid from the Nazis in secret rooms in the house until
they were discovered and arrested in 1944. Frank’s widely read Diary of Anne
Frank provides a first-person account of daily life under such strenuous condi-
tions in the midst of one of history’s most horrifying genocides. Sadly, Justin
Bieber missed the solemn and reflective nature of his visit when he signed the
museum’s guestbook, “Truly inspiring to be able to come here. Anne was a
great girl. Hopefully she would have been a belieber” (Duke, 2013). When
the message was later posted to the museum’s Facebook page, fans were out-
raged that the singer hoped that Anne Frank, a teenager whose memories give
a face to the tens of thousands of lives uprooted and extinguished by the Nazi
regime, would have been a “belieber”—a girl head-over-heels in love with Jus-
tin Bieber (Duke, 2013).
Communication is appropriate when it meets the demands of the situa-
tion as well as the expectations of others present (whether physically or virtu-
ally). In almost all situations, cultural norms and rules set the standards for
expectations. Although Justin Bieber may have thought his comment would
show appreciation for Frank as a regular teenager who liked celebrities, he
violated norms about modesty and respect in a reflective historical place. He
made his admiration of a woman whose story inspires millions appear to be
more about himself.
Sometimes even those whose profession it is to communicate, such as jour-
nalists, can also be inappropriate. After the disastrous 2013 Santa Maria, Brazil,
nightclub fire that killed almost 250 people, reporters jockeyed for the “most
CONNECT
One skill that can help you
communicate appropriately
is self-monitoring. As you
learn in Chapter 2, the abil-
ity to monitor yourself and
your environment for clues
on how to behave is quite
powerful. At a party, you
can assess how formal or
informal a situation is, what
types of messages are
considered acceptable or
off-limits, and so on. Such
knowledge allows you to
tailor your communication
to be competent in your
environment.WHILE STARTING OUT
in the world of publishing,
Hannah from Girls doesn’t
always make the best com-
munication choices. Ali Paige
Goldstein/© HBO/Courtesy Everett
Collection