WANT TO COMMUNICATE EFFECTIVELY? CONSIDER THESE 3 STEPS.

In today's evolving world, one soft skills that is essential to growth and development of communication skills. This skill is easy to learn and master it yet, many who wish to learn it ignores some basic steps thus, making it difficult for them to master it. There's a vast difference between communication and effective communication and people are good at communicating but are not good to communicate effectively.

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Effective communication is the the information or messages you shared with audience(people you communicate to) is received, understood and acted upon so that the aim or purpose of which you intended in achieved. This means that your audience clearly understands what you have communicated and has acted on it with an appropriate feedback that is mutually understood by all. For effective communication, the initiator(sender, speaker) needs to consider the following steps if she/he wants the outcome of her/his conversation to be effective. Thus, must consider;

• Choice of Medium the choice of medium have great chance to distort the message in the sense that the intended audience/receiver may not identify with the medium or can are not more abreast with how to decode information using the medium especially when it has to do with technology. For example, if a detergent company wants to advertise on how effective their products are, then the appropriate medium to use is television where their products can be explain and demonstrated for audience/viewers to see. Such advertisement may not be suitable for radio where audience has to use imagery and symbolism to understand(decode) such messages.

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• Avoid jargons, Colloquialism and ambiguity- This would help your listeners to identify and understand your messages since there's clarity in what ever you say. Many mistake people does is to load their speech with jargons and words that are not relevant to the audience more so, if the intended audience are of different background from the speaker. Such messages should be complete and accurate for everyone to understand. When communicating, we should not assume that the audience understand everything we say. so efforts must be made to explain all technical terms to the basic level where everyone would understand.

• Consider environmental and Semantic Noise-The noise it the environment needs to be considered when communicating. The noise could by physical noise such a moving vehicle, celling fan, ringing of mobile phone etc. All these could obstruct how audience grasp messages more especially when it relates to public speaking. Semantic noise would come in when it relates to written communication. This when some statement written are interpreted differently by the audience instead of the intended meaning of the sender(speaker). For example;
  Woman without her man is nothing.
  Woman without her, man is nothing
  Woman without her man, is nothing
  All these three examples can be interpreted differently by the receiver thus, causing semantic noise.