We live in a century of speed and communication and sometimes the speed at which we communicate deeply affects our business and/or our personal lives as well. One could not emphasise enough the importance of a fast communication; however, one should also not neglect the quality of the communication. Whether we communicate verbally or in written form, we should constantly take into account the specific rules characterizing that particular form of communication that we resort to.
E-mails, faxes, memos, leaflets, brochures, catalogues, business letters of all kinds and telephone conversations are all ways of sending a certain message. Consequently, they share a number of general rules and display a particular set of characteristics that should be taken into consideration by the sender of that message.
Irrespective of the chosen means, the process of communication presupposes several basic elements without which the mere concept of communication could not exist: the emitter (sender), the message, the channel (medium), the code and the receiver (addressee). These elements establish certain relationships among them and the easiest manner of analysing these relationships is to draw a simplified model of the communication act in the shape of a diagram.
The emitter sends a message to the receiver via a medium using a certain code of signs. The medium could be the air (in the case of a face to face conversation), the paper (in the case of a written message), electric impulses (in the case of a phone conversation), the virtual support provided by the Internet (in the case of an e-mail message), etc. The nature of the medium is closely related to the nature of the code employed by the sender; one could say that they are interdependent to a certain extent. If we take for instance the smoke that Native Americans used to resort to in order to communicate with other members of the tribe or another tribe altogether, the only medium which would allow communication is the air.
