Checking Understanding

Checking that communication has been understood is an essential part of the process. A vital skill that checks understanding is summarizing. A summary should bring together the main points of an exchange of information. This will allow the individual to correct you if necessary. This can help you to check that you have correctly understood.

Questions are another way of checking whether a message has been received.
Make sure you ask questions in a way that the individual has to provide a detailed response (open questions), rather than asking questions which only require a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ (closed questions). For example: ‘What do you like to do in your spare time?’. However, closed questions can be useful in some situations.