The sender is the information source.

How the sender converts the message from thoughts into words. For the purpose of business communication, encoding will focus on word choice or diction and tone. How you craft a message is important because words can have a positive or negative connotation.

Tone refers to an author’s use of words and writing style to convey his or her attitude towards a topic. Tone is often defined as what the author feels about the subject.

Connotation refers to an implied meaning that’s associated with a word in addition to its literal meaning. This association can be cultural or emotional.

The channel is the medium that you choose for your message. This can be face to face, on the phone, over email or by text.

How the receiver perceives the message. This can be affected by noise, past relationship with the sender, and the receiver’s identity.

The target of your communication. This is the person or group of people that you are communicating with. Decoding of the message can be affected by the receiver’s identity. Factors affecting identity: gender, race, socio-economic background, level of education, and lived experiences.

Feedback is an important part of the process. It’s where the receiver communicates back to the sender. The process then begins again. Based on the feedback, the sender can determine if the message was received clearly.

Physical or Environmental Noise is literally background noise that interferes with you hearing a message. It could be loud music in the shopping mall as you are trying to check your voicemail, or a distracting co-worker talking loudly as you try to make a message on the phone. Physical noise will affect verbal communication more than written communication.

Physiological Noise is a distraction caused by physiological processes that interferes with the communication process. It originates from within the sender or receiver and has to do with a physiological process of the body. For example, if the sender of a message is experiencing stress, anger, fatigue, or hunger, it will affect the way that he or she encodes his or her message. If the receiver is tired, he or she may not decode the message clearly and accurately. Sometimes physiological noise may simply be the receiver’s ability to hear the message, like the example earlier from the show, “Seinfeld.”

Psychological noise results from preconceived notions we bring to conversations, such as racial stereotypes, reputations, biases, and assumptions. When we come into a conversation with ideas about what the other person is going to say and why, we can easily become blinded to their original message. Most of the time psychological noise is impossible to free ourselves from, and we must simply strive to recognize that it exists and take those distractions into account when we converse with others.

Definition

Stereotype: a stereotype is an over-generalized belief about a particular category of people.

Source: Cardwell, Mike (1999). Dictionary of psychology. Chicago Fitzroy Dearborn. 978-1579580643.

Bias: is disproportionate weight in favor of or against an idea or thing, usually in a way that is closed-minded, prejudicial, or unfair. Biases can be innate or learned. People may develop biases for or against an individual, a group, or a belief.

Steinbock, Bonnie (1978). “Speciesism and the Idea of Equality”. Philosophy. 53 (204): 247–256. doi:10.1017/S0031819100016582. Archived

Semantic Noise caused by the sender. This type of noise occurs when grammar or technical language is used that the receiver cannot understand clearly. The sender’s encoding or diction is usually the problem in this case as it does not match the receiver’s ability or identity. (This will be discussed more thoroughly when we learn about purpose and audience).