Greene to give public lecture on communication skills
John Greene, the 2002 Cecil and Ida Green Chair for speech communication, will speak today about the importance of communication skills, how they vary within people and how they can be improved.
By Joi Harris
Staff Reporter

John Greene, who was named by Communication Monographs as one of the top 100 most active communication researchers from 1915-1995, will lecture and meet with speech communication faculty and students during a campus visit this week.

Greene, a journalism professor at Purdue University, is the 2002 Cecil and Ida Green Chair for speech communication.

He is scheduled to give a free public lecture titled “The Most Important Three Things You Already Know About Communication Skills” at 5 p.m. today in Moudy Building North, room 141.

Greene said he will stress the importance of communication skills, how they vary within people and how they can be improved.

“Although it seems like a topic with no news,” Greene said, “once you dig below the surface there’s still a lot to be known about these three topics.”

Chris Sawyer, speech communication department chairman, credited Greene as being one of the “premier outstanding scholars of the communication field.”

“Because he’s produced a lot of influential work in communications, he will expose students to a wealth of knowledge they might not otherwise have the opportunity to experience,” Sawyer said.

Greene helped develop an “action assembly” theory that deals with general and communication-related anxiety from a cognitive stance, Sawyer said.

Paul King, a speech communication professor, said the theory involves the whole process of encoding, listening and decoding a message.

Greene is also the current editor of Human Communication Research, a leading research journal published by the International Communication Association.