Communication Theory: the intersection of two minds

The theory of communication is that it is the intersection of two or more human minds. In order to communicate, one person has to be saying or writing something–typically called the “sender”--and the other person (or people) has to be listening to reading the message–typically called the “receiver”. Communication happens in the space between the people, the space where someone says something that another person hears or someone writes something that another person reads.

So, communication means that the sender has to craft a message the receiver *can* understand, which typically involves at least three features:

1) Clear: The message must be clear to the receiver. This means it must use vocabulary, sentence structure, and organization that the reader can understand. Communication changes depending on the audience’s age, experience, education, and a variety of other factors.

2) Concise: The message must be concise because the receiver has a limited attention span–whether listening or reading, the receiver can only receive so much content before their mind wanders. The sender’s goal, then, is to communicate the most amount of information in the shortest amount of time–before the receiver gets bored and starts thinking about other things instead of receiving the message.

3) Nice: The message must be considerate of the receiver. This means that the sender can’t just go on and on forever. The sender has to give signals that the sender is aware of and communicating *to* the receiver as a specific audience. Messages that are tailored for a particular audience are more successful than messages that are just sent to anyone. That’s because the receiver needs to feel like they are a valuable part of the communication process, too, and not just a passive recipient of the message.

In the end, communication theory helps us understand that every time we send a message, it is *for* a particular person/group of people and the better we as senders tailor our  messages for our receivers, the better the receivers will receive them.

Since most of us learn to write in school where the focus is on getting our thoughts out of our heads and onto the page/screen in front of us, we typically write from the perspective of sharing our ideas.

It’s not until we get out into the work world, where so much of what we do is transmitted through writing, that we start to understand how writing actually moves work forward. 

The things we write have actual meaning that will affect other people’s ability to do their jobs.

And writing *for* someone else is very different from writing for yourself or even for a teacher who is analyzing your ability to write. When we write to get others to act, our writing has to connect with that reader so that they understand what action we want to take *and* feel motivated to take that action. 

Writing at work directly affects work product and outcomes. So the way in which we write uses different strategies and techniques to reach the reader. 

We already know that there are different types of writing–a grocery list is different from a screenplay–but most of us haven’t studied how a grocery list is different from a screenplay or why a grocery list is different from a screenplay. We don’t study language that way because, well, we’re interested in other things! But writers do study the differences between grocery lists and screenplays and poems and signs and emails and social media posts because we are interested in how language is used in different situations to affect different audiences to accomplish different purposes. 

You don’t need to know all the nuances of language to use language. 

But when you are writing at work, you do need to think about who you are writing to and what they care about and how they read and why they would (or wouldn’t) do what you are asking them to do. You do need to think a bit about how to craft and shape your message in ways that encourage the people you work with to do what you want them to do.

And the more you understand how to design messages that are audience-focused, the more efficient and effective you will be at your job because you will be able to communicate in ways that get people to do what you want them to do (and leave you alone). 

Communication is a kind of compromise in the mutual understanding of an idea. Two people will never have exactly the same understanding of an idea. But we can understand enough in common for it to make sense to both of us and be actionable by both of us.

That’s the goal. To communicate in such a way that two (or more) people reach a shared understanding of something.

And that requires that the idea be shaped so that it is clear to both people, concise in its delivery and concept, and nice so that everyone feels good (or at least neutral) about it.

That’s what we mean by effective communication: something that is easy to understand in both concept and time expended and makes the people involved feel as good as possible. To achieve this, we have to give up other things–like a full and complete understanding of exactly what is intended, for example. 

In business, we are told that there are three factors constantly pulling against each other: quality, time, and cost. You can have something fast and cheap, but it’s low quality. You can have something cheap and good, but it will take time. You can have something fast and good, but it will not be cheap. And it’s possible to optimize those things, but you end up either with something that is good quality, takes a long time, and is expensive OR something that is poor quality, can be made quickly, and is cheap.

In communication, we also have three factors: clarity, conciseness, and nicety. The difference is that these qualities are not limited resources. Language is an infinite resource. We can optimize messages so they are clear, concise, and nice. All we have to do is take some time to learn how to do all three and then practice combining them in different situations for different purposes and different audiences.

Audience-focused communication ensures that what we say and what we write is hear/read and understood by our audience in ways that can be acted on. And that’s all any of us really want at work (The same strategies also work in our personal communication; so we can all practice them this holiday season!).