In spoken English, especially if the listener is facing you, I think gestures are more important than perhaps we realise. I smile when people do that 'hooked fingers each side of the head' to represent quotation marks. It's a bit affected and silly, but it's a quick way to indicate one is quoting someone else.

On the telephone, these visual aids are missing, and it makes conversation a little more difficult. On paper, it's even harder to communicate, unless one is very careful to punctuate and spell as accurately as possible.

I learned British Sign Language to Level 1, and of course the deaf have their own gestures and facial expressions (in addition to the recognised signing) which make meaning clearer.

French is terrible for needing tons of punctuation. I communicated with my husband (many years ago now!) on Messenger, and I had no idea how to convert my keyboard to produce accents, umlauts, cedillas etc. So my written French was naked so to speak. It meant that my words were open to misinterpretation to no small degree.