Saying It with Skill Communication in Our Lives. By Julia T. Wood. Wadsworth Publishing Company, 437 pages, $39.95. Communication skills are like musical aptitude or athletic ability, says Julia Wood, Nelson Hairston professor of communication studies. "You might have native talent, and you might do it all the time," she says. "But you can become excellent if you study the formalities." Her new textbook, Communication in Our Lives, discusses effective communication in a variety of settings: relationships, public speaking, the workplace, and even self-reflection. In each chapter, Wood describes communication problems using scenarios taken from her own experiences and from her students' anecdotes. Then she considers how the issues might have arisen and suggests solutions. Her main goal is to help readers become fluent in a variety of communication styles. "It enlarges us so much when we can stop judging people from other social communities according to the norms, values, and rules that we learned," Wood says. Wood's text also demonstrates how those perceptions are influenced by cultural and racial diversity. "There are many different cultural standpoints even within a single society," she says. "When we ignore that, what are we teaching people? That there's only one correct way of communicating? That message is particularly inappropriate in a textbook." Wood says she wrote the book because she couldn't find a communications textbook that included the most recent research - a common problem when active scholars don't write textbooks. That kind of long-standing division between research and teaching is unproductive and artificial, she says. "The best teaching comes from research," Wood says, "and the best research comes from teaching." - Elizabeth Zubritsky