Miscommunication

We’ve all experienced it in our lives: miscommunication. That awkward moment when you meant to be sarcastic, but everyone thought you were being serious. Or when someone totally misinterpreted something you said.

I think miscommunication can be caused by multiple reasons. The first one is interpretation. Everyone interprets a message in their own way; everyone gives their own meaning to a message. And that meaning or interpretation doesn’t have to be the same as the sender implied: miscommunication.

The other reasons are the medium you use, body language, the pronunciation and the tone of voice. It makes a lot of difference whether it’s face to face communication, a text message, or a phone call for instance. Mostly you can see on the sender’s face and/or hear by the tone of voice if a message is meant to be funny, or serious, or something else. All those aspects are part of the message. And if one or more of them are missing, it’s harder to understand the sender’s meaning.

So that’s why I think the best way to prevent miscommunication, is to communicate face to face. That doesn’t mean that that won’t lead to miscommunication. It can still happen. There can also be noise in the background (another reason!), so you can’t hear the message correctly. And there probably are more reasons that can cause it.

It almost looks like it’s really hard to get your intended meaning to your receiver(s). Well, it can be. But as you know, it usually turns out the right way.