WRITING RIGHTLY

WRITING is a means by which we produce and share knowledge. In the knowledge economy, people who have mastered the art of writing set the agenda for societal discussions and determine the direction and pace of change. Much of what is discussed on radio and TV is gleaned from newspaper articles, journals, reports produced by government agents and civil society or books.

Writing is no more a specialty for secretaries, journalists or professional authors. It has become a prerequisite for meaningful participation in all spheres of human discipline. Listen to Professor Kenneth Davis of Indiana University:

“In this knowledge economy, writing is the chief value-producing activity. But you may not be writing as well as you could. That may be because you think writing requires a special talent.

In fact, writing is a process that can be managed, like any other business process. If you can manage people, money, or time—then you can manage your writing.
And you can profit from the result.”

Yes, you can profit from the result of sharpening your writing skills. And no matter your training or your field of work, it is an imperative that you learn to write and write well. How can you write and write well? How can you write in a manner that makes sense to your readers?

CONCEPT
WHETHER it’s a report, letter, book, SMS, an e-mail or essay, every write-up must encapsulate an idea. If you are not clear about what you want to project, how can you write to make sense to your readers?

Writing is not just a matter of putting words together on a piece of paper or a computer screen. Writing is the use of words to convey meaning. Before you draw your laptop, tablet or pen to scribble something, clarify the idea in your mind.

CONTEXT
WITHIN my scope of activities, I do write-ups for academic, corporate and personal purposes. When it involves academics, my diction, tone and even formatting are different from corporate and personal write-ups. For instance, I do not make use of first person pronouns when I do academic write-ups. Similarly, in corporate write-ups, I use a very formal tone which contradicts the cordial tone I use when I am writing informal stuff.

You can identify the proper context by asking yourself the following set of questions:
1. What do I want to achieve with this write-up?
2. Who am I primarily writing this for?
3. Who else is likely to read what I am writing?

These questions will help you to define the scope and boundaries of what you write. A teacher who prepares lesson notes for students will definitely write in a context different from a note meant for the head of school. So will a man who seeks to win the heart of a lady use a romantic tone to draft a note for her. Understanding context is the key to communicating effectively through writing.

CLARITY
THE objective of getting the context right in any writing endeavour is to achieve clarity. Clarity ensures that the concept of the writer is understood by the reader in exactly the same way that the writer intends it to be. Remember, in writing it is better to imprint your ideas on the minds and hearts of readers than to merely impress them with your words or style without any understanding.

Don’t forget that unlike speaking, you will not have the benefit of physical presence to explain yourself when something is not clear in what you have written. Ensure that your choice of words, style and tone of writing combine to make your work meaningful to at least your core target.

CREDIBILITY
ONE crucial thing writers do not leave to chance is the authenticity of the material they produce. Authenticity preserves the integrity of your work and strengthens it to stand scrutiny. How do you make your work authentic?

1. Be an example of what you write about. For instance, journalists who write to expose corruption in their countries must ensure that they themselves are upright and incorruptible. If you write a medical journal that cautions people about the dangers of tobacco and nicotine, you must not ever be seen smoking. If your lifestyle contradicts your writings, nobody will take what you write seriously.

2. You must also cover your bases through intensive research. Good research will help you to know different faces of your concept and enable you to deliver a balanced output.

3. Be humble enough to admit that you don’t know it all. Therefore, do well to acknowledge all your sources of information. Failure to do that will make you liable for plagiarism. And if you must know, plagiarism is the highest form of intellectual dishonesty.

Having a credible script does not mean everybody will hail your work. It just means that nobody can discredit you. Any disagreement or reservation will simply be a matter of opinion.


© 2012 Terry Mante
Personal Development Network (PEDNET)
Accra, Ghana
E:: terrymante@live.com
T:: +233.268.816.545

The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination - J. K. Rowling

"...some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default."

"...personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement."

Author of the Harry Potter series, J. K. Rowling delivered Harvard's 2008 Commencement Address. I am glad to present to you what she said. Both the text and the picture (above) were sourced from http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2008/06/text-of-j-k-rowling-speech/ Hey, take note that all the emphases are mine. Feel the inspiration, grasp the challenge as you read.



President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates.

The first thing I would like to say is ‘thank you.’ Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I have endured at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and convince myself that I am at the world’s largest Gryffindor reunion.

Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can’t remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, the law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.

You see? If all you remember in years to come is the ‘gay wizard’ joke, I’ve come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step to self improvement.

Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that have expired between that day and this.

I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called ‘real life’, I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.

These may seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.

Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.

I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that would never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension. I know that the irony strikes with the force of a cartoon anvil, now.

So they hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents’ car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.

I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all the subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.

I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.

What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.

At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers.

I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.

However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person’s idea of success, so high have you already flown.

Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea then how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.

Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above the price of rubies.

The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned.

So given a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.

Now you might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I personally will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working at the African research department at Amnesty International’s headquarters in London.

There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.

Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to speak against their governments. Visitors to our offices included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had left behind.

I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him back to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.

And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just had to give him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country’s regime, his mother had been seized and executed.

Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.

Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard, and read.

And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.

Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s places.

Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.

And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.

What is more, those who choose not to empathise enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.

One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.

But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people’s lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped change. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children’s godparents, the people to whom I’ve been able to turn in times of trouble, people who have been kind enough not to sue me when I took their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.

So today, I wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom:
As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.
I wish you all very good lives.
Thank-you very much.


Source: http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2008/06/text-of-j-k-rowling-speech

THE ART OF LISTENING

How can you speak if you have not listened? What will you say if you have not taken time to listen? - Terry Mante

HEARING AND LISTENING
HEARING and listening are not the same. Hearing is the act of perceiving sound. It is involuntary and simply refers to the reception of sound or what is technically referred to as aural stimuli. Listening, on the other hand is a conscious and selective activity which involves not only the reception of sound but interpretation as well.

Hearing doesn’t require effort. You could sit in a room and hear the sound of the engine of a moving vehicle. For you to discern the make of vehicle, you have to listen by paying attention.

VIRTUE OF LISTENING
LISTENING is a means by which we derive content and ideas for speech. So how can you speak if you have not listened? What will you say if you have not taken time to listen? Listening is more important than talking. When you listen, you learn. You beef up your knowledge. You understand. You get inspired. Don’t be in a hurry to have your voice heard. By all means there will be time when your voice will be needed. But really, you gain the right to be heard only after you have listened to others.

CATEGORIES OF LISTENING
THERE are two broad categories of listening you must be aware of – passive listening and active listening.

When you have little motivation to listen carefully, you engage in passive listening. Passive listening is the kind of listening you do when listening to music. For instance, you don’t need to understand the lyrics of a song to enjoy or dance to it. Indeed, you can concentrate on other things while you listen to music.

However, if you were listening to a lecture or a talk broadcast on radio or TV, it would be possible for your mind to drift (or think about other things) and not be conscious of what is being said. In my high school History class, I was once called by my teacher to answer a question. I got up and I had no clue about the question. I didn’t know what the question was. Meanwhile, the question had been asked to the hearing of the entire class. I was in the class physically but mentally I was far away. Disgracefully, I had to tell Ms Baiden and the class that I didn’t know the answer. I couldn’t bring myself to say that I was not paying attention.

The way to cure such a situation is by active listening; which involves listening with purpose – to gain information, receive insights, obtain directions, share interests, understand others, solve problems, etc. This requires a lot more effort than hearing or passive listening.

LISTENING WITH PURPOSE
THE purpose of listening is not just to hear but to understand – to grasp the idea the speaker is attempting to transmit. Follow these time-tested techniques and you will improve your listening skills:

1. Spend more time listening than talking. One thing that I find irritating is to be interrupted while I’m following a discussion or a news story on radio. And it gets even more irritating when the person asks, “What did they say?” Instead of listening, they ask questions or comment on the discussion without getting the full import of what is being said. Don’t talk when the speaker is still talking. Wait, listen before you comment or ask a question.

2. Do not dominate conversation. Typically, a conversation is a verbal exchange of ideas or thoughts between two or more people. It is important that you allow the other person or people to express themselves. The less you talk, the more you listen.

3. Plan responses only after others have finished speaking NOT while they are talking. The temptation to think of what to say next while a person is talking could interfere with your listening efficiency. Relax and listen. When the person finishes, you will definitely have something to say. Even if there is nothing to say, the fact that you listened is a big deal.

4. Keep conversation on what others say, NOT what interests you. If you want people to enjoy talking with you keep the chat on issues that interest the person. Don’t focus too much on yourself.

5. Take brief notes. I hardly listen to a lecture or a sermon without taking notes. This practice helps me to concentrate and crystallize the ideas the speaker tries to put across.

6. Provide feedback. There are several ways to provide feedback while listening – nodding, smiling, gesturing, eye contact and so on.



© 2012 Terry Mante
T:: +233.268.816.545
E:: terrymante@live.com
PEDNET
Accra, Ghana

SPEAKING WITH PRECISION AND CONFIDENCE

Confidence is not born out of mere desire. It is cultivated through practice. - Terry Mante

CHALLENGE OF SPEAKING
THE ABILITY to speak is a universal human endowment. Ordinarily, every human being knows how to speak. However, many people do not know how to effectively communicate through the words they speak. This challenge becomes accentuated when one has to speak to a group of people.

Speaking to communicate effectively may be a natural gift for some people, but for the rest of us it is an artistic skill that can be learnt. Even for those who are naturally endowed with the gift of the gab, there is still a need to learn how to use their gift to communicate effectively.

Everybody who so desires can cultivate the ability to speak to people in a manner that makes sense and resonates with the people.

CONFIDENCE TO SPEAK
MANY people find it tough to speak in public because of fear – the fear of making mistakes, the fear of not making sense, the fear of offending people and the fear of being rejected. Nevertheless, this fear could be overcome. Here are some guidelines on how to overcome your fear of speaking:

1. Esteem yourself: Many people shy away from speaking in public because they feel inadequate. They have low regard for themselves. They freeze in the presence of others. They feel uncomfortable when they are the centre of attention. If that is your challenge, you should learn to appreciate that you are as human as everybody else and that no one is more human than you are. You can control how you feel by seeing yourself as a valuable person.

2. Equip yourself: In speaking to people, one thing that self-esteem cannot replace is knowledge. Before you can speak confidently on a subject, you must have command over it. Command is established by consistently filling yourself up with knowledge through voracious reading, active listening and intense observation. If you do this continuously, you will be ready when the time comes for you to speak.

3. Expose yourself: To be a confident speaker, you must speak. A speaker speaks. Avail yourself of opportunities to practise speaking. Volunteer to do the prayer, be the MC at your family get-together and say the vote of thanks. In conversations, let your views be heard after others have spoken. If you do this often, you will eventually learn to overcome your fears and establish yourself as a good speaker. Practice makes perfect.

DELIVERING EFFECTIVELY
SOMETIMES, when I see certain public officials make speeches on TV I feel pity for them and their listeners. They have a script on the lectern, tilt their head slightly so they can keep their eyes focused on the script and read with a fumbling voice. Their speech writers give them good scripts but they deliver the scripts poorly.

Every public speaker will tell you that the first few seconds or minutes always present a baggage of diffidence and uncertainty. Those who do not cave in in those initial moments are the ones we celebrate as outstanding speakers.
Effective public speakers act confidently. Confidence is not born out of mere desire. It is cultivated through practice. Even when you don’t feel confident, you must act confident. When you act that way, you infuse your audience with confidence and create an atmosphere that boosts your own confidence.

Celebrated speakers also know how to use non verbal elements of speech to drive home their message. Social psychologists and communication experts have found that non verbal communication constitutes about two-thirds of all communication between people. Learning to use non verbal cues would add flavour to your speech.

NON VERBAL CUES

1. Eye contact: This regulates the flow of communication. It signals interest in others and increases the speaker’s credibility. People who make eye contact open the flow of communication and convey interest and concern.

2. Facial expressions: Smiling transmits happiness, friendliness, warmth and liking. So if you smile frequently you will be perceived as more likable, friendly, warm and approachable. Smiling is contagious and makes people respond favourably. They will be more comfortable around you and will want to listen more.

3. Posture and body orientation: You communicate numerous messages by the way you pose and move while you talk.

4. Vocal: Speaking in a monotone voice will present you as boring and dull. You must vary the pitch and speed of speaking.

© 2012 Terry Mante
T:: +233.268.816.545
E:: terrymante@live.com
PEDNET
Accra, Ghana

CRAFTING YOUR MESSAGE

Having a message is not sufficient to make the communication process a resounding success - Terry Mante

MESSAGE
AT THE heart of any communication endeavour is the message. There is no communication without a message. However, having a message is not sufficient to make the communication process a resounding success. It is the manner in which the message is prepared, the medium used to transmit the message, the credibility of the sender, timing of the message and state of the receiver that define the success or failure of the communication process.

Your message is important. That is why you must be particular about how you cultivate and deliver it. To ensure that your message is appropriately packaged and presented, you need to take care of the content and context.

CONTENT
EVERY message is packaged in words and symbols. These words and symbols are what we refer to as language. Language is the tool used to formulate the ideas that the originator of a message seeks to convey. If you want to bridge the gap between your intended message and actual interpretation, you must definitely work on your language. Two elements of language are critical.

First, grammar. Every language is governed by rules that must be observed by all users of that language. If you want to transmit a message in a particular language, ensure that you are well-versed in the rules of the language. You must also know how to apply these rules to make your message comprehensible.

If you communicate in English for example or any other language for that matter, you have to be conversant with subject-verb agreement, tenses and parts of speech (noun, pronoun, adjective, verb, adverb, preposition, conjunction and interjection). If you want to fix your message, you must fix your grammar.

The second critical element of a language is diction. Diction refers to the words you use to communicate your message in a manner that is clear, correct and effective. When you communicate, your goal is not to prove how many “big” words you can amass. Your goal is to ensure that you are understood. However, to have good diction you must expand your array of vocabulary. This will broaden your word options and help you to choose the appropriate words to transmit your message.

CONTEXT
IMAGINE your colleague at the office approach you with a grimace and a fisted arm with a message, “I congratulate you on your promotion. I look forward to working with you.” How would you receive such a message? With a pinch of salt I guess. This shows that in a message, content must be delivered in an appropriate context.

Context is the way the message is delivered; it is called paralanguage – the nonverbal elements in speech such as tone of voice, look in the sender’s eyes, body language, hand gestures, emotions, etc. Context or paralanguage is so powerful that if it is not well conceived by the receiver, the message will be distorted. Context projects the character of a message.

As an author and publisher I know that no matter how good a script is, poor presentation will water down its acceptability on the market. Font style, font size, typeset, design, binding style and print quality influence the character of a work of literature.

COMMUNICATION INFLUENCERS
THERE are four factors that could have an impact on your message.

1. Noise: These are extraneous factors that interfere with your message. They compete with you for the attention of the receiver.

2. Attitude: Don’t focus on yourself. Focus on the other party. If you focus too much on yourself, your message will achieve nothing but conflict and confusion. Watch out for defensiveness (feeling that someone is out there to get you), superiority (the feeling that you know more than the other person) and ego (making yourself the center of attention). Remember, attitude is everything!

3. Culture: Culture is the totality of knowledge, beliefs, arts, practices of a person or group of people. If you don’t have a fair knowledge of the culture of the receiver, you will likely send a misguided message.

4. Situation: Once, in my university days, I proposed to a lady friend right in the middle of examinations. While I was busily negotiating for space in her heart, she was wondering, “So Terry, how are you preparing for the next paper?” No wonder I was bounced. Be sensitive to the environment when you want to transmit a message.


© 2012 Terry Mante
E:: terrymante@live.com
T:: +233.268.816.545
PEDNET
Accra, Ghana