Principles of Communication free essay sample

PRINCIPLES OF COMMUNICATION Communication is a two-way process of giving and receiving information through any number of channels. Whether one is speaking informally to a colleague, addressing a conference or meeting, writing a newsletter article or formal report, the following basic principles apply: * Know your audience. * Know your purpose. * Know your topic. * Anticipate objections. * Present a rounded picture. * Achieve credibility with your audience. * Follow through on what you say. * Communicate a little at a time. * Present information in several ways. * Develop a practical, useful way to get feedback. Use multiple communication techniques. Read More: www4. uwm. edu/cuts/bench/commun. htm Analysis: PRINCIPLES OF COMMUNICATION When communication takes place, we must consider the different communication principles in order to establish a good relationship with the audience, especially when you’re delivering speeches in a conference. Every forms of communication, whether does have an intention. Therefore, persuading your audience/listener or the receiver of the message is your primary goal when communicating. We will write a custom essay sample on Principles of Communication or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE. Order to start a good speech, the speaker must consider this first principle. In all panel discussions or in a conference, the speaker must know how to handle his/her listeners; it’s up to him how he’ll do it. Let’s take this situation as an example: A team of a certain NGO is conducting a seminar on how to do use condoms in Tondo, Manila. Group of plain housewives attended the seminar. Some of them have poor education, while others are much luckier than those who have not. Before the team started the lecture, they conducted a survey to everyone who attended the seminar. That’s their way of knowing their audiences. KNOW YOUR PURPOSE. What’s the purpose of the speaker in communicating? Primarily because he has a goal to be understood, a goal to share information to the audiences and to get something from those information he/she shared. For example: A pastor is having a biblical study together with the prisoners. He knows his audience, of course, but his purpose? Of course he knows it too. He is doing this because he’s a servant of God. He was meant for this mission. That was his purpose. KNOW YOUR TOPIC. The speaker must not be haphazard to the information he’ll share with his/her audience. It must be reliable. For example: A professor in biology is teaching in a class of nursing students. His topic is about the human anatomy. Before he teaches all the information to the class, he must first research all the necessary facts available. ANTICIPATE OBJECTIONS. Communication is complex. When listening to or reading someone elses message, we often filter whats being said through a screen of our own opinions. One of the major barriers to communication is our own ideas and opinions. For example: A speaker has finished his speech for the RH Bill advocacy. The audience was silent, but he can see the reaction through their faces that their minds were bursting with ideas. So he finally asks a question to them. â€Å"I am looking forward to all the objections and ideas available. After that question someone raises a hand and speak that breaks everyone’s silence. The speaker begins to answer the audience’s objection with a grin. PRESENT A ROUNDED PICTURE. Persuading the audiences/listeners when communicating is one of the most difficult yet challenging tasks to do. Plain words sometimes aren’t just enough because the audiences have different interests, so to be able to make persuasion of the audiences more effective, there must be a picture that will be presented by the speaker. Example situation: A professor is beginning to find out that one by one his students are getting bored to his subject. He did all his best to persuade them by using interesting words but it seems like it doesn’t make sense. So he think of a better idea, at the next meeting of their class the following week, he’ll bring rounded pictures to illustrate more to his students all the ideas he wants for his students to be understand. ACHIEVE CREDIBILITY WITH YOUR AUDIENCE. Aside from the goal of achieving the attention of the audience, the speaker must also achieve credibility. It’s important to the speaker. If he doesn’t achieve his credibility, his audience would no longer be interested to the things he’s saying. And that’s gauche. Example situation: A speaker who’ll be delivering a speech about the campaign in maintaining a green nation is about to deliver his speech. He finally stands in front of his audience, he dressed formally, he knows about his audience, he knows his purpose, his topic, even planned to anticipate objections and present a rounded picture about his advocacy. He smiles confidently, that’s his way of achieving the credibility with his audience. FOLLOW THROUGH ON WHAT YOU SAY. Information that is shared especially when in front of the audience must be consistent. Any topics that are unnecessary must not be included in delivering a speech. Example situation: A guest speaker from a prominent political clan on Pampanga was invited on a conference attended by the law students in the Polytechnic University of the Philippines was at the middle of delivering his speech that was related to politics, of course. The speaker must attain consistency in his speech. Any unimportant statements will eliminate the interest of the audience. COMMUNICATE A LITTLE AT A TIME. It is important to maintain a relationship with the audience, it’s a must. Example situation: A speaker is reading his speech but manages to look at his audience so that he would know whether his audience is getting something from him or not. PRESENT INFORMATION IN SEVERAL WAYS. Don’t make the ideas redundant. Example situation: The speaker uses different information from other references so that the audiences would be able to get something from other sources, not just depending on the available ones. DEVELOP A PRACTICAL, USEFUL WAY TO GET FEEDBACK. It’s always a pleasure for the speaker to know if his audience got something from the ideas he shared. The speaker must use this principle to be able to know that the audience learned from him. Example situation: The speaker uses cards given to the audience that’s indicating some ideas so the audience will share also what they learn to their fellows. USE MULTIPLE COMMUNICATION TECHNIQUES. It is the most essential principle needed to be used by the speaker. Communication techniques are the usage of technological devices, I think. Example: a speaker uses LCD Projector in discussing an issue. MISCONCEPTIONS OF COMMUNICATION Before considering definitions of communication, we should consider the misconceptions that those definitions will have to address. 1. Communication is Information Transfer The first myth is that communication is simply the transfer of information, just like a computer. This is part of what Theodore Roszak in 1986 called  The Cult of Information, where we assume that human beings behave just like computers as data processing machines. The fact is, we’re not machines. Our communicative behavior is much more complex. Part of that omplexity is the fact that we do not respond equally to the each message, even to the same message sent at different times in a different context. If we assume, therefore, that once we have sent a message, it will obviously be correctly received, we set ourselves up for communication failures. Communication is not about giving information. It is about exerting influence. Far from being guided by logic, it is guided by psycho-logic, to coin a phrase. The goal of communication is not simply telling, but acting, changing another person’s behavior through what we say to them. Example for this is that a teacher is teaching to his students. He’s giving information, but it doesn’t end there. He uses influence, that’s the teacher’s motivation to his students. 2. Communication failures can be solved by restoring the connection Mortensen: â€Å"The notion of gaps and breakdowns automatically portrays communicative activity as a directional and linear sequence of events-much like electronic impulses traveling from beginning to end in a telephone system or digital computer. Once this linear, one-way analogy is accepted, it is almost impossible not to think of communicative difficulties as a result of some malfunctioning that occurs along the line. To correct a breakdown, one is tempted to search for the part or element that needs repair, much as a telephone repairman looks for a break in circuits along a row of telephone lines (Smith, 1970). Even worse, communication tends to be defined in all-or-nothing terms: Either the system works or it does not; the signals arrive at their destination, or they are blocked somewhere along the line. † The general concept of the communication gaps are compared to electronic pulses of a telephone system or a digital computer by Mortensen. If we assume that communication is simply the transfer of information, then all we need to do to solve it if repair the open circuit, plug back into to the network, tune the signal. Example for this is when two people are chit-chatting through the phone and then one person on the line loses the connection. That was meant on this misconception of communication. 3. Communication is either on or off Again, if communication is information transfer, when it fails, it must fail completely. No signals can sneak through a broken network connection. However, human communication can’t be turned off so easily. Some messages, perhaps unintentional, still exert some influence. In a sense we can never have a communication failure—some message is communicated even if it is not the one the speaker intended. Mortensen: â€Å"Running through the previous quotations about communication breakdown is an implicit and mistaken notion that â€Å"no† communication occurred. Supposedly, whenever people fail to arrive at an identical point of view, we can merely assume that they have-almost by definition-â€Å"failed to communicate. † . . . . Communication does not necessarily stop simply because people stop talking or listening. In this misconception of communication, it is stated here that when people transferring information fails to do it, communication completely fails. The truth behind this misconception is that, even if people stop talking, it doesn’t all ends there. They can communicate verbally or non-verbally to be able to share information. They can exert influence in this. Example for this one is: two students were told by their professors to keep their mouth shut and then the professor moved them in separate places. The professor thinks that the he finally ended the noisy interaction between those students. But, actually it’s not. The two students kept on blinking each other’s eye. 4. Communication is passive If communication is information transfer, it doesn’t take much active effort. We have come to regard communication as passive. We simply send our messages and let them take their course, never bothering to reinforce them or check to see if they were received. When we begin to see communication as exerting influence, we can see it is hardly a passive matter. We have to actively attend to the messages we send. We have to be conscious of the unintentional messages we give out that may betray our unguarded intent. We begin to manage our communication strategically, making sure we make the most of the messages we send. We must overcome what  George Orwell called â€Å"the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes. †Ã‚   The belief that communication is static, is a totally misconception. But as the example’s definition stated it depends specifically if its info transfer, it doesn’t take active effort. Example for this is: when the students doesn’t ate their lunch even if it’s 12 yet they had a continuous class, their professor kept on sharing information but they kept silent. . Communication success is defined in legal terms Two and a half millennia ago,  Plato described three different kinds of communicators as three different kinds of lovers. The evil lover is concerned only about  himself  and abuses the audience to get what he wants. The neutral lover is like our legal-minded communicator; he gives the bare facts with no care for the ultimate outcome. The best communicator, Plato argues, is like the noble lover who, overcome with a divine madness, does all he can to get his message across for the sake of the audience. Giving the facts is not enough. We have to change the way people work and think. This misconception comes out of the litigious world we live in. We may assume that once we have formally communicated, we have met our legal obligations to get a message across and therefore have no further obligation to communicate. If our purpose in communicating is only to meet some legal standard, this assumption would be correct. But if our purpose is to change someone’s behavior, this assumption falls far short of effective communication. for example: the speaker is responsible for making communication his priority. 6. If human communication is like machine communication, humans must be like machines. Roszak has pointed out that one problem of assuming that machines â€Å"think† like humans is that it leads us to think that humans â€Å"think† like machines. One of the major liabilities of the data processing model of thought is the way in which it coarsens subtle distinctions in the anatomy of the mind. The model may do this legitimately in order to simplify for analytical purposes; all scientific models do that. But there is always the danger—and many computer scientists have run afoul of it—that the model will become reified and be taken seriously. When that happens on the part of experts who should know better, it can actually falsify what we know (or should know) about the way our own minds work. There we discover the riskiest ideas of all. Yet they may also be the richest and most fruitful. For there we find what might be called the master ideas—the great moral, religious, and metaphysical teachings which are the foundations of culture. Most of the ideas that occupy our thinking from moment to moment are not master ideas; they are more modest generalizations. But from this point forward I will be emphasizing master ideas because they are always there in some form at the foundation of the mind, molding our thoughts below the level of awareness. I want to focus upon them because they bear a peculiarly revealing relationship to information, which is our main subject of discussion. Master ideas are based on no information whatever. I will be using them, therefore, to emphasize the radical difference between ideas and data which the cult of information has done so much to obscure. * Let us take one of the master ideas of our society as an example: â€Å"All men are created equal. The power of this familiar idea will not be lost on any of us. From it, generations of legal and philosophical controversy have  arisen,  political movements and revolutions have taken their course. It is an idea that has shaped our culture in ways that touch each of us intimately; it is part, perhaps the most important part, of our personal identity. To see communication as data transfer can lead to the assumptions that humans should be treated as machines to solve human communication problems. Read More: www. shkaminski. com/Classes/ /Definitions%20of%20Communication. htm Submitted by: Kathleen v. maranan Bcr 2-2