Barriers to communication
How to Reduce the Impact of Barriers
General Communication Skills
Age of audience
The age of the audience can be barrier because if the speaker is using a lot of technical language or any other jargon that the audience is either to old or too young to understand, the age of the audience needs to be taken into consideration when giving a talk or presentation so you use the right language and technical speak to fit the age group, for older people a lot of technical language is something they would not understand the same for younger children to overcome this you just need to know the audience and make sure and use the appropriate language
Cultural differences
Each culture has a lot of differences getting around these differences can hard to do but if you know that there is people with different cultural backgrounds you can compensate for this and make sure they feel comfortable. This can have an affect as one culture may have a different way of saying hello compared to what you are use to so this should be taken into account when giving a presentation or talk or just in general talking to a person
Interpersonal skills
Hearing Difficulties
People who have hearing difficulties can be a barrier as they may not be able to hear you as well as somebody without a hearing difficulties or at all depending how severe the problem. There is software to help with people who have hearing difficulties and there is also the use of Lip reading and sign language to overcome this barrier this allows communication between people who cannot hear so well or at all and people who have normal hearing
Body Language
Body language can also be a barrier as people who use defensive positions like standing with legs or arms crossed may show them that you are putting up a defensive stance may think that you don’t really want to communicate; also using a lot of hands movements can confuse a person and they may be focused on what you are doing and not what you are saying. To overcome this a person must make sure they use proper body language and not use to many hand gestures and movements and be sure not to use any defensive positions or facial expressions.
Communicating in writing
Formal Language
The use of jargon that is specific to the topic may be difficult to understand for a person who does not know the topic and is trying to either learn about it or just reading about it, this is easy to overcome as all it takes is to either explain the language used as you go along or remove some of the jargon to make it easier to understand for people reading about it.
Identifying Relevant Information
Identifying relevant information is very simple, this can be done by just highlighting, bolding and underlining text, this allows information that is important to stand out. This can help so that the audience or just any other general text, a person will be more likely to look at highlighted information than normal text.
