Primary to effective communication is a message. Any human activity has message value. That is, human activities can convey or symbolize meaning to others. In its simplest sense, a message can be a idea, emotion, desire, or emotion that one person shares with another. This can be occur whether or not a person intends to send such a message. When people think they are listening patiently to someone, but their eyes drift away from that person and become fixed on some object, they have sent a message. Another person, observing their behavior, can assign a meaning to it.
Before a person can improve his or her skills he or she must be aware of the basic ways in which people send and receive messages. These can be classified in two major groups: verbal messages and nonverbal messages.
Verbal Messages
Messages sent verbally are messsages expressed in words. Since we already know that people communicate with words, it may seen unnecessary to talk about that kind of behavior. However, people need to be aware that their effectiveness in a given situation will often depend on the words they choose to use. There is a whole science devoted to the study of meaning in words, the science of semantics. Because of the study done by the specialists in this area, people know a great deal more about meanings and how they are conveyed through words.
Meaning is a product of what goes on in the minds of both the sender and the receiver. Meaning is not permanently assigned to words. It is carried about in the human mind and is often the result of an individual’s experiences with language and meaning. Thus, a word may have many shades of meaning. Effective communication depends on finding meanings shared by the sender and the receiver. Understanding this simple fact makes the role of feedback clear. People can not know if the other person meanings are shared if they giving a reactions to each other in a communication situation.
Language is symbolic. It stands for impressions and notions people have. It is important in sending messages that the person knows as much as possible about those with whom he communicating. People also need to aware that words stand for things, but the words are not those things. Thus, labeling an idea or a person does not make the label true. It merely indicates a feeling or an idea that one holds about the thing or person.
Languages chances, too, and because it does, the meanings one person attaches to a word or a group of words may not agree with another’s understanding of that word or phrase. Slang and expressions used only in a small geographic area or by one ethnic group can make communication difficult if some effort is not make to discover the meanings carried by such expressions.
Nonverbal Messages
About 65 percent of the meanings people get from a communication situation come to them from the nonverbal elements rather than from the words that are spoken. Research has shown that the nonverbal messages will often override the words spoken in interpersonal communication. For example, imagine that a friend accuses a person of having played a piratical joke on him or her. The person deny it but blush uncontrollably. The friend will believe the message sent by the blush rather than the statement of innocence.
One very important concept about nonverbal messages is that they are often sent and received subconsciously. That is, people may not realize that they are sending or receiving any message at all. When a nonverbal message is sent, they become aware of it through all their senses. They process and assign meaning to the message at the same time, and often they are unaware that they have performed this thought process. An important step in improving communication skills is to become aware of nonverbal behavior and to make the sending and receiving of nonverbal messages a concious process. Nonverbal behaviors that sent messages can be grouped into three types: paralanguage, kinesics and proxemics