Use the eight phases of the communication process to analyze a miscommunication you’ve recently had with a co-worker, supervisor, classmate, teacher, friend, or family member. What idea were you trying to share? How did you encode and transmit it? Did the receiver get the message? Did the receiver correctly decode the message? How do you know? Based on your analysis, identify and explain the barriers that prevented your successful communication in this instance.  

Here it is an example:Some guests were arriving at my place. I thought to do everything my own. I said to my mother that I will do all the preparations and care of guests on my own. Me as the sender of the message (doing all preparations) encoded in words and used the face-to face channel to transmit the same. The receiver being my mom decoded that I will be doing all the work for the guests and hence she shall do nothing. In providing the feedback, she told that it is fine.I prepared the table, cooked all the items on myself. However, at the time of serving, I was expecting my mom to show up. But she did not come. I waited for her but she did not turn up. The result was I had to do everything on my own and there was some delays in the service.Later, when the guests left, I asked my mother as to why did not come up for my help. She told me that she did not interfere as I had clearly instructed all the preparations and taking care of guests would be done by me. I said will the preparations, I meant the table and the food. I needed you at the serving time. She said I assumed you would do it alone.This made me realized that miscommunication happened between me and my mother. I clearly made semantic barriers. I chose a wrong word ‘all preparartions” which my mother took so seriously that she did not turn up when I needed her helps. Psychological barrier also worked here as I thought my mother would understand what I meant as she and I always understand what things are and the way we talk.

Look at the example to create an idea of what needs to be done but do not use that example.

Here it is another example:Brenda wants to remind her husband, Roberto, to stop by the store after work and buy milk for dinner. She forgot to ask him in the morning, so Brenda texts a reminder to Roberto. He texts back and then shows up at home with a gallon of milk under his arm. But something’s amiss: Roberto bought chocolate milk when Brenda wanted regular milk. In this example, the sender is Brenda. The receiver is Roberto. The medium is a text message. The code is the English language they’re using. And the message itself is “Remember the milk!” In this case, the feedback is both direct and indirect. Roberto texts a photo of milk at the store (direct) and then came home with it (indirect). However, Brenda did not see the photo of the milk because the message didn’t transmit (noise) and Roberto didn’t think to ask what kind of milk (context).