communication

 There is much #talk nowadays of the communication industry and are communication experts, consultants and engineers. However, it would be #misleading to believe that communication is the province of a small group of people highly #qualified and highly #trained in a specific discipline. Whether we like it or not, we are all part of communities, of some sort or other and are thus necessarily #involved in communication. When we communicate with someone, we are trying to establish a co-union by sharing an idea, an attitude, a mood, a feeling, or #informating. We can communicate in many ways: by writing a letter by ringing a doorbell by making a telephone call and by #pulling a face.

Any communication process is essentially composed of three elements -a #source, a #signal and a #destination. The #source may be an individual person speaking, writing, gesturing or an organisation such as a newspaper or a radio or television #station. The #signal may consist of ink on paper, soundwaves, a gesture or anything which is capable of being #meaningfully interpreted. The #destination may be an individual, a group or a member of a group.

• The first stage of the process is the encoding of the message in a form which can be transmitted e.g the thoughts in our head cannot be transmitted until they are coded into some kind of overt behaviour. When the signal has been transmitted, it must be decoded and pass on to the destination for the communication process to be complete. Where source and encoded are one person, destination and decoder another and the signal is in the form of spoken or written language, then we have one human communication.

In theory, such a system may look simple and straight forward but in practice, there may be imperfections. E.g the source may have inadequate information; the message may be inadequately or incompletely encoded; the transmission of the message may be to slow or to fast, the message may be distorted in the decoding process while the destination may be incapable of handling the decoded message properly.

• One of the basic skills in communication is knowing how much can be communicated at any one time. In speaking and writing, the nature of language partly determine this, for language is an organised sequence of sounds, or in the case of writing, symbols representing sounds, govern by certain probabilities. A certain part of our message is not open to free choice. For example, in English adjective usually precede the noun they modify, and the subject of a verb usually precede the verb, i.e grammatical structure is fixed, while the only choice lies in the lexical items used. The organization of language helps us to "hear" a message even when there is noise or other interference.

• Communication is a continuous process. We are constantly coding and decoding symbols. It is a circular rather than a linear process. We can monitor how well this process is carried out by the feedback we get from our audience.

• When we communicate, we rarely rely on only one channel. When we speak, what we have to say is conveyed on several levels. Primarily in a spoken message, there are words to decode but certain words are stressed while others are unstressed. We also use certain rhythm and intonation patterns to give added meaning to words. Further information is carried by the tone of voice and by gesture and facial expression

 Whatever the message to be communicated, whoever or whatever the source and destination, all communications follow the system described above