• Introduction To Communication Skills Notes

This page is part of Noteson Communicationa free ebook fromDownload as PDF fileNOTES ONCOMMUNICATIONA FEW THOUGHTS ABOUT THE WAY WEINTERACT WITH THE PEOPLE WE MEETA free ebook by Dr Gordon CoatesOn This Page:AcknowledgementForewordAcknowledgementI am greatly indebted to my honorary editor, my wife Suzanne Norris, both forrescuing me from the worst examples of my habitual assault upon the English language and for providinga critical appraisal of the text. Various errors may well have survived. If so, they simply reflectmy recidivist tendencies. Therefore, if you cannot understand a passage in the text, blame me;but if you can understand it, thank Suzanne – as I have been doing, with good reason, fornearly thirty years. ForewordThis book describes some of the ways people communicate with each other, butit neither aims nor claims to cover more than a fraction of the whole field of communication.Indeed, communication is such a very large topic, and this is such a very small book, that theideas which I have included really only provide a brief introduction to a few of its many aspects.Nevertheless, I have found all the ideas discussed in these pages both interestingand helpful, which is why they are included. I hope they will at least be of some use to somereaders. I also hope that they will encourage curiosity about the wider field of communication– a field which is oceanic, incompletely understood and constantly evolving.In case it is not already obvious from the above, this little book is notwritten for experts.

For those who are interested but not expert, I hope it will be very rewarding.Even for those who are expert but still interested, a quick browse may be worthwhile. However,if you are an expert and you are not interested in reviewing what you already know, then you havewasted quite enough time already – these notes are not for you.Incidentally, because of the significance of emotions to many aspects of communication,this book contains a number of references to my earlier book, 'Wanterfall', which outlinedmy ideas about the understanding and resolution of human emotions. Although it may seem a littlerepetitive, I have given a reference in a footnote on each occasion, in the interests of easyaccess, rather than putting it at the end of the book.There are various definitions of communication, and in a moment I will give youthree of them. They are not all the same, but they mostly only differ in fairly minor ways. Theword itself is derived from the Latin verb communicare, which means 'to share'or 'to make common'. That derivation provides one half of the English meaningof communication.The other half of the meaning of communication has to do with informationand meaning. These are related, but not identical, concepts.

However, in simple definitionslike the three shown below, information is far more likely to be mentioned, than meaning. Whyis that?It is difficult to do justice to the interaction between information and meaningin a brief definition, or indeed, in any brief fashion. This matter will be addressed in variouschapters and appendices. For now, though, I will simply say that, while information always meanssomething, it rarely, if ever, means exactly the same thing to different people.

Communication is the sharing of information Communication is the giving and receiving of messages Communication is the transfer of information from one or more people to one or moreother peopleThe first of these three definitions is the simplest, and also the broadest.Because of those qualities, it is also a little nonspecific. The second definition reminds usthat information, here called a message, must be received, as well as sent, to complete the process.For example, a message launched in a bottle might achieve communication, but it also might not.None of the above definitions requires information to flow in more than one direction(though the first two do rather imply this). Two-way communication is certainly more common, andis often preferable, but a one-way delivery of information, such as advice or instructions, stillconstitutes communication.The last definition above only applies to communication between people.Animals, plants and machines are also capable of various sorts of communication, but they arenot included in this definition. (They are not included in this book, either – though machinesdo get a brief mention in Appendix 4.)This last definition is perfectly satisfactory for our purposes, though, as thisis a book about communication between people. That implies at least two people – one ateach 'end' of the process.

It can, of course, involve many more than two people.How does communication actually occur? If it can be simply defined, as we haveseen above, can it be just as simply achieved? It seems to me that the process by which communicationoccurs is very simple in concept, but can become extremely complex if it is inspected closely.The simple version goes something like this. The sender, who has a message, somehowputs it in a form which can be sent, and somehow sends it in the direction of the receiver.

Introduction To Communication Skills Notes

Thereceiver then somehow receives it, somehow gets it into their brain, and somehow attributes meaningto it. This version includes a great deal of 'somehow', but no 'how' at all!The complex version of the communication process is either utterly fascinating,or incredibly boring, depending on your point of view. Download sidify apple music converter 3.0.7 crack. Many thousands of pages have been writtenabout it, and agreement between the authors of those pages is far from complete.

I have includeda little bit about the details of the process in Appendix 1, for any interested readers.However, not everything about the process involved in sending and receiving messageshas been banished to Appendix 1. Some of its practical aspects will be discussed in the next chapter.Before that, though, I will make a first tentative step towards redeeming my promise to say moreabout the related concepts of information and meaning.Whether writing about communication, or simply chatting over lunch, the wordmeaning is quite often encountered. Because it is a common word that we all use frequently, itis easy to forget something very important about it. While always present within an individualmind, meaning is never fully transferable. I am commenting on this complex matter earlyin the book, because everything said later, in every chapter, is subject to this limitation –a limitation inherent in all communication.The meaning attributed to any message by the receiver can never be exactly thesame as the meaning intended by the sender, because they are different people, with differentsense organs and different cognitive function. There are also many other factors which influencethe degree to which the receiver's meaning differs from the sender's meaning.In the case of a word or phrase, the surrounding words or phrases usually provideuseful clues.

Language features (such as formal, informal and idiomatic language) and sentencestructure (sometimes called syntactical grammar) also provide extra information. In the case ofspeech, factors such as timing, stress and intonation are very significant.The overall structure and organisation of the communication (sometimes calledtextual grammar) must also be considered, as should the individual characteristics of the senderand the receiver.

Any concurrent messages, especially non-verbal ones, will also exert an influence,as will other factors such as the pre-existing knowledge of each communicator and the relationshipbetween the communicators.The method by which a message is delivered, and the form in which it arrives,will inevitably have an impact on the receiver. The purpose of the communication and the audienceto which it is directed are also very relevant. The overall situation in which the communicationoccurs, and the local – and more distant – events surrounding it, also play theirpart.These various things which influence the meaning attributed to an instance ofcommunication are often referred to as the context of that communication. However, contextis not always applied in such a broad way.

Sometimes it is used to refer to particular aspectsof the influences surrounding a message.Do the preceding paragraphs mean that communication is doomed to constant failure?There is more than one answer to that question. One could argue that the transfer of a representationof some information to the mind of the receiver is all that can be expected of the communicationprocess.

From that viewpoint, the process might be considered successful, even if the meaningattributed is not the meaning intended.However, that view of communication will not satisfy everybody. Many will wishto share their intended meanings as closely as possible with their target audiences, no matterhow small or large those audiences may be. In order to do that, communication must become an artas well as a science.There will be examples of ways in which meaning can be influenced in most ofthe chapters in this book. In addition, in Appendix 1, information and meaning will be addressedat a little more length.

This will still not be sufficient to scratch the metaphorical surfacesof these elusive concepts, but I hope it will at least give an idea of their nature and significance.