Select Your Words Carefully

Although only around 50 percent of human communication is through written or spoken words, the balance being through body language, it is the most effective communication channel. Its message is more definite and clear than that of body language.

For this powerful tool to be effective, one must be very careful in choosing his/her words in the message. The following rules apply -

1. In any language, no two words are synonym although their meanings may be close to each other. Were they synonym, they would not have evolved at all. Their very existence is indicative of their distinctive identities. Go deep in finding the meanings of similarly meaning words and use them in accordance to the context.

2. Use a language and words which are easily understood by the recipient. For this, first know or fix your target audience and tailor your message accordingly. As a general rule, no two categories of people take the same meaning out of a message. Subjectivity always works in understanding meanings of messages.

3. Make your wordy message gender-free as far as possible if it is meant for both the genders. Some linguistic barriers create hindrances in this respect. Like the words - his/her, he/she, etc. have to be used very carefully and probably both for the message to be gender-free.

4. A wordy message has the advantage of having minimum ambiguity while body language may have it. To make best use of this positive attribute of words, you have to be more careful in selecting your words.

5 Use your words economically. Redundant words in a message often add ambiguity, check them out. Less the words, more effective is the message.

6. Make your message, particularly the written ones, globally understandable. Use of local slangs in a written work limit its effectiveness. Remember that slangs often take different forms at different times even at the same location.

7. Be timely in a conversation and timeless in a written message as far as possible and as the case may be. Remember, your message written today may be read any time in the future and it should be fruitful at every time it is read. On the contrary, spoken words have to be timely and extremely tailored to suit the need.

8. Listen more than say in a conversation. This makes your messages more audience-friendly and easily understandable. If you have patience in a conversation, you will notice avoidance of a lot of redundancy of words.

By keeping these observable rules in your mind, you messages shall be more effective.