By definition, communication is to impart or exchange thoughts, opinions, or information among people via verbal or non-verbal platforms. Therefore, effective communication will be the accurate transmission of the original message from the sender to the receiver. Today, communication is inevitable in all social settings. For instance, chatting with your family members at home, discussing projects with your schoolmates in school, holding a meeting with your colleagues at work or even asking strangers for directions require good communication skills. For this reason, effective communication can bring people together but miscommunication keeps people apart. Hence, it is crucial to understand that bidirectional listening and speech organisation is necessary for smooth delivery of message.
Listening
plays an important role in the communication.
From the cartoon above, the idle
bird (receiver) failed to focus
when the hippopotamus (sender)
was speaking and conveyed the wrong message to the zebra. This cartoon
demonstrated that listening is essential for the right message to propagate.
Likewise in real-life context, one who listens attentively to the speaker is
more likely convey an accurate message. Conversely, one who fails to listen is
more likely to convey the incomplete or wrong message. Therefore, in the
real-life situation, one should always listen before speaking to avoid
unnecessary problems caused by
the inaccurately perceived message.
Speech
organisation allows clearer articulation and facilitates better understanding
of the message. Personally, I have always found presentations to be intimidating and I tend to let
my nerves get the best of me. Through experience, an organised speech will
help people to understand and to bring the message across effectively. There upon, I believe that speech
organisation can aid the presenter in
giving a comprehensible presentation.
In conclusion, I believe that
communication is not as simple as it seems, it is something which could not be
taught by lectures but to be learnt through
experience. Like academic presentations, daily communication requires both attentive
listening and thoughts organisation to facilitate fast and precise communication.
Hence, everyone should learn how to listen and to speak for communicate effectively.
Hi dear,
ReplyDeleteThis was a nice post with fine articulation of the various aspects of good communication. What is better is your desire to sharpen those skills so that you can be a more effective person among social and family groups.
You only might want to elaborate more on what the 'right way' is in your final sentence. Speech organization is not talking about the 'right way' yet. Maybe you were suggesting the right way to be the occasion in which you are going to talk in, and this was missing.
Having said all these, you are likely going to have a very fulfilling journey in ES2007s.
Caster
Thanks, Phyliss, for the interesting post. One reason that I write this is because you seem to be subscribing to the linear model of communication. Why might I write this?
ReplyDeleteAnother is because you refer to how "effective communication will be the accurate transmission of the original message," and yet because I can't see the cartoon you are referencing, your message is perhaps an example of an "inaccurate" transmission. (Can you see the cartoon on your post?)
What you do here that is clear is focus on your own needs, especially with regard to public speaking. I like the way you contextualize that in the opening paragraph. But I'm not convinced that the process always (or even usually) involves "bidirectional listening."
I have a few comments about your language use as well. Here's a couple examples of when using present tense would be better in order to show the fact that the statement is a general statement of truth:
Likewise in real-life context, one who listened attentively to the speaker is more likely convey an accurate message. >>> Likewise in real-life context, one who listens attentively to the speaker is more likely convey an accurate message.
Conversely, one who failed to listen is more likely to convey the incomplete or wrong message. >>> Conversely, one who fails to listen is more likely to convey the incomplete or wrong message.
Another couple minor language issues:
1) to let my nerves gets >>> to let my nerves get
2) I believe that communication is not as simple as it seems, it is something which could not be taught by lectures but to be learnt through experience. Like academic presentations, daily communication requires both attentive listening and thoughts organisation to facilitate fast and precise communication. >>> This is a "run on sentence"...do you know why?
In any case, thank you for the effort here. I look forward to reading more of your writing!
Hi Phyllis,
ReplyDeleteI like how you draw attention to the importance of the role of the receiver during communication. When discussing techniques for effective communication, we almost always place the onus on the sender or speaker to deliver his/her message in an appealing way. However, it hardly the case that we are in a speaker/audience scenario and I wholeheartedly agree that active listening is an important aspect of effective communication.
I believe active listening as a concept can be extended further to include actively receiving feedback. I say feedback because our communication is not limited to just listening but other non verbal cues and body language as well. This feedback takes place constantly and is not segmented into a sender or listener role. By constantly receiving feedback, we can gauge the other party's reception and tailor our communication to suit the occasion and person.
Kel Ley
Hi Phyllis,
ReplyDeleteI liked how you incorporated a cartoon which shows how the original idea of the message is often lost in transit. One of the orientation games that are popular in camps revolves around this concept. Many of us have no doubt also witnessed this phenomenon in real life as well.
I agree with your point that miscommunication drives people apart, I have been in many situations whereby the end result does not come out well due to some misunderstanding between different parties.
Cheers,
Chris