I was recently reading a post in the Guardian newspaper about Sarah Palin’s malapropisms and how recently prominent US politicians have had a case of foot in mouth.
As we all know, communication can be a movable feast, albeit with one’s foot in one’s mouth. However isn’t the message the sum of the parts?
For example, parents know their children can get their message across quite succinctly when they need to, without using the whole Thesaurus. Mind you, the communication can collapse when the message from the parent falls on deaf ears.
In our experience the emotion behind the message and the emotion of the recipient is essential for effective communication.
If you are sitting listening to someone eloquently drone on in a bored “I’ve said this many times before” voice, as a listener you quickly tune out. On the other hand if you are listening to some one who is passionate about their topic, even though they get the odd word muddled, we still ’get it’.
Of course all this depends on how the receiver prefers their messages…there is always the odd one who is happy with the bore as long as their PowerPoint presentation is full of obscure interesting research which they can read and then tune out.
Thank goodness for people with passion!
