Photo by Alexander Mils
We have all been there. The annoyance of a communication error. We have all been in fights with significant others or friends because we did not recognize their sarcasm in a text message. Or what about when you arrive half an hour late because auto-correct changed the time you were meeting?
Communication errors are undoubtedly a pain. However they seem to have become a more common occurrence recently. The first thought is to look to technology. Our generation grew up in an era where you could reschedule plans, or make them in the first place, impulsively and easily. Preplanning is not necessary anymore. We realize we are bored and start sending texts.
Now that we typically communicate via text it does not come easy to many of us to convey tone. Not when we are used to attaching an emoji or two. This easy and casual way of communicating makes it difficult for our generation to write letters, papers, or emails in a way which truly conveys our ideas. The more traditional use of bold, italics, punctuation, etc. to give tone has been replaced. Yet, when emojis are not available, many of us struggle in showing our sarcasm or sincerity.
On top of the issue of available technology, most of us lack communication or public speaking education. The few of us that have been taught public speaking had it crammed into a semester or two. And let us be real, no one really paid to those classes. As soon as the final is over, we forget. All we remember is the terror of standing in front of our class to give a presentation.
Many teachers have attempted to combat this weakness by assigning group work. This tends to only make matters worse. Several of us rarely have good group work experiences. Usually one person gets stuck with doing everything. If the assignment is evenly split there is not much communication between the various sections of the project. Experiences such as these have made us rather do all the work on our own so at least our grade represents our own work, which only makes our communication skills less advanced.
With an issue as important as poor communication it seems overwhelming to fix. Yet, with a couple general thoughts to keep in mind, we can start on the path of reducing communication errors. It’s important to ask for clarification when reading and to try to recognize when a piece of writing could be interpreted a couple ways. On the flip side, be aware of tone in your own writing. Do not be reliant on spell check to fix your errors. It is not perfect. Editing, making sure that you are saying what you meant to, could save a lot of future arguments. With these ideas in mind we can work to combat communication errors.