Key to Effective Communication: Clarity

I have read many excellent postings on this board, and maybe I should "pop" out of the water and utter some of my own "nonsense", too;)

There are so many things one can say about effective communication, but nothing is more important than the most obvious yet often overlooked element of effective communication:  clarity.

THE POINT: Clarify of Message:

Don't communicate if you don't have a clear message.  This is very obvious, but we do every now and then start to communicate without having a clear idea about WHAT exactly we want to say.  When you hear "What are you talking about" too often, it's time to think:)

ENUNCIATION:  Effective Oral Communication

You can say all you want about pronunciation, and you can try to get rid of "local accent" as hard as you can, but at the end of the day,  variation is the rule.  Don't ever expect Australians to pronounce long "a" the way Americans pronounce it:  they will forever utter it more like "ai" than "a".  Listen to a Bristish and American to say the word "hot":  the American will make it more like "hut" than "hot".  Accents are even more rampant, ranging from regional within a nation to continental throughout the world:  there's no ONE accent that's the rigth accent.

So let's forget about pronunciation and accent for the moment; let's concentrate on ENUNCIATION instead.  That is to articulate consistently, to speak clearly.  In other words, don't slur and don't swallow sound.  No matter how "correctly" you can pronounce every vowel or consonant,  it's the sentence that matters.

BREVITY and SIMPLICITY:  Effective Written Communication

Unless you are in the legal (or perhaps creative writing) profession, "big" words don't necessarily impress people.  Neither do carefully crafted long sentences and loaded paragraphs.  In this age of information overflow, people have less time and patience to go over visually overwhelming writing.  If you have taken any fast-reading training, chances are you have been told to read the first and last sentence of each paragraph to get the idea.  That's how to be an effective (fast) reader.  To be an effective writer, you might want to do the same:  make your first and last sentence the primary messenger, and don't put too much in between if you don't have to.  People will most likely skip it anyway;)

In summary:  clarity in the message and clarity in how you convey the message, that's the key to effective communication.