1.2 The Communication Process: How It Works

Speaker. The speaker is you, communicating with someone else. As the speaker, your job is to get your message to someone else in a way that can be understood.

Message. The message is what you have to say, including your words, images you use, and your nonverbal behaviors, such as facial expressions, hand gestures, and voice inflections. Basically, everything you do communicates. Even choosing not to communicate communicates something. As students learn in their very first course in communication, “you cannot not communicate.” Communication breakdowns sometimes occur if we think we’ve communicated something we haven’t, if we communicate too much or too little, or if we make assumptions (that are wrong) about what someone else means. While breakdowns are common, repairs can be made! We all have room to improve as communicators.

Channel. The channel is the sensory, verbal, and visual path your message travels on to reach someone else. Just as your cellphone transmission carries your voice to the person you are talking to, your voice carries your message to your audience, and your facial expressions, gestures, and tone of voice verify, strengthen, or can even conflict with what you say. When you’re being sarcastic or funny, for example, what you say and how you say it may clash, like, “Ouch! Nice haircut!” when your best friend is complaining that she got “butchered” at a new salon.

Listener/Audience. The listener (or audience) is your intended recipient(s). When you’re giving a speech, the audience is made up a group—large or small—of listeners. The role of the listener, ideally, is to pay attention to you and your message.

Feedback. Your listener(s) provides feedback by laughing, nodding, staring blankly, or smiling, for example. These behaviors let you know if your listener is tracking, or if you need to clarify or back up and repeat something.

Interference (noise). When you use your cellphone, you experience interference firsthand—static or dropped calls, for example. But when you’re communicating face-to-face, interference can be someone whispering to another person, poor lighting, or the whirring of an actual machine—anything that keeps messages from getting through. All of these things are considered external interference. On the other hand, distractions that come from within—a headache, hunger pains, a troubling personal issue—are considered to be internal interference.

Context. The context is the setting for your speech, and it includes things like the time of day, the location, and the event. For example, you might be called upon to give a toast along with a speech at your brother’s wedding, so you’ll need to tailor your speech to consider the time of day (morning, afternoon, or evening), the location (in a church or on a beach), and the event itself, which means you’ll need to say something moving about your brother and his new partner.