Benjamin Jon

Professor Smajda

ENG 170

November 2020

Annotated Bibliography

Whenever people communicate, there are communication barriers that hurt the quality of the message intended to be transferred from the communicator to their audience. One of the most impactful barriers to communication is “perception filtering.” For instance, when people want to verbally communicate an idea that is in their minds, they must first translate it into words, they must deliver it to the audience, and then they must hope the audience will receive the idea that they intended to send. When one goes through the process of translating an idea into words, the message that is about to be delivered must undergo lossy compression. Once the message is delivered, the audience must interpret it through their own perception of the world as it enters their mind. The perception of the audience’s mind and the communicator’s mind are different, and the delivered message and the communicator’s intended message are also different. The process of communicating a message to an audience will always end in information loss and the audience will never receive the full construct. For the second major assignment, I will delve into the causes and effects of this communication barrier, as well as what people can do to resolve or improve the issue of information loss as we communicate with others.

 

Waltman, John L., and Marcia Simmering. “Communication.” Encyclopedia of Management, edited by Marilyn M. Helms, 5th ed., Gale, 2006, pp. 85-89. Gale eBooks, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX3446300042/GVRL?u=newpaltz&sid=GVRL&xid=be88a8cb.

This source is a section of the book, Encyclopedia of Management (5th ed.) that explains a communication barrier regarding how people are likely to interpret one’s message differently than one intended when they sent it. The source thoroughly explains the communication barrier and the process that causes it to occur and how people specifically in the business field can communicate differently to “adapt” to their audiences so that the audience can easily interpret the right message.

This source is from the Encyclopedia of Management (5th ed.), written by John L. Waltman and Marcia Simmering. Marcia Simmering is an accomplished Professor of Management at Louisiana Tech University, with a B.B.A. in Human Resource Management and a Ph.D. In Management. She has published many scholarly articles and owns a company named Dickerson Management and Career Consulting, which provides support to organizations through human resources training and consulting. The Encyclopedia of Management is published by Gale, a publishing company that is known for its database of scholarly material.

I will use the practical strategies mentioned in this book to explain how we can overcome the proposed communication barrier. For example, this source includes a section on “communication redundancy,” “audience adaptation,” and “nonverbal communication.” Each section provides strategies on how we can better our communication. These strategies will provide a direction for how I will suggest people should solve the communication barrier.

 

Bunnell, Pille. “Reflections on Languaging.” Constructivist Foundations, vol. 15, no. 2, Mar. 2020, pp. 152–155. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=142568303&site=ehost-live.

This source is a section of a book named Constructivist Foundations which explains concepts in Biosemiotics, a field concerned with semiotics and biology and how our minds interpret meaning in language. More specifically, Pille Bunnell writes about ideas he has on the “richness of systemic coherence” as we move from “abstract thinking” to “thinking developed through oral language” and into “systemic cognition,” and the implications that arise from those ideas.

The author of Constructivist Foundations is Pille Bunnell, who is a systems ecologist who works with cybernetics at the American Society of Cybernetics. Bunnell was also a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. This source is credible and cites many scholarly sources.

This source provides a piece of information that is well suited for supporting a claim that expresses how to conquer a communication barrier. The passage states, “7% of our communication is based on words, 38% on prosody…” showing that a big portion of our communication occurs through our body language. Since our body language makes up a big portion of our communication, I will be using this source to explain what we can do to improve the process of delivering our message to others by focusing on the nonverbal aspect of communication that many overlook.

 

N/A. Communication in the Real World: an Introduction to Communication Studies. University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing, 2016.

This source provides an explanation for how our minds perceive and extract information from the world through a process of selection, organization, and interpretation. It offers an in-depth analysis for each part of the process and introduces concepts like “salience,” “schemata,” and how we find organize information that is in our mind.

The citations listed in this section (section 2.1) of the book come from many scholarly articles that reflect works written by experts in the field of psychology like the “Journal of Experimental Psychology” or “Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.” The writers of this book were removed at the request of the original publisher, but the current publisher is the University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing which is a reputable source.

The information in this source can help strengthen the argument of my claims in Major Assignment #2. I will use my understanding of the psychology of perception to show what causes “perceptual filtering” and how people are likely to interpret a communicator’s message. By understanding the psychology of perception, I will be able to propose pragmatic solutions to solve the issue of perceptual filtering and ambiguous interpretations in receivers.

 

Alshanetsky, Eli. “What Comes First: Ideas or Words? The Paradox of Articulation – Eli Alshanetsky: Aeon Essays.” Aeon, Aeon, aeon.co/essays/what-comes-first-ideas-or-words-the-paradox-of-articulation.

This source introduces the idea that the relationship between our communication and our thoughts is a paradox. The author of this article writes that although we tend to think that we have our thoughts and then translate them into words, we might communicate our words before we have the thoughts. The author brings up many examples of why this may be the case. However, the author also mentions the gap between words and thoughts. He states, for example, that a mathematician who has a mental image of an idea and has trouble expressing their idea is an example of the “inadequacy of language to cherish ideas entirely in words.”

The source of this article comes from the website Aeon, a digital magazine that posts articles and videos about philosophy, psychology, science, and other ideas relating to the humanities. The author of this article, Eli Alshanetsky, is an assistant professor of philosophy at Temple University in Philadelphia who has written the book, Articulating a Thought, which generally covers the ideas introduced in his article at Aeon. Throughout the article, Alshanetsky frequently references words from well-known philosophers like Fredrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Socrates.

From this source, I can use the philosophical view of Alshanetsky to demonstrate the idea that a thought can be difficult to put into words. The article also states that communicated words can be spontaneous and that words can sometimes come after thoughts. I will use these ideas to explain the issue of the process of sending a message as well as how we sometimes send messages that do not accurately depict what we think.

 

Heath, Dan and Heath, Chip, 2008. Made To Stick. New York: Random House Publishing Group.

Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath was a book that was written to explain how we can effectively communicate an idea by following six principles: Simplicity, Unexpectedness, Concreteness, Credibility, Emotions, and Stories. Throughout the book, Chip & Dan Heath explain what these principles are through concrete examples and how we can implement them to better our communication skills.

Chip Heath is an accomplished individual, a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and a teacher of business strategy and communication. Heath is known for writing popular self-help books like Made to Stick, The Power of Moments, and Decisive: How to Make Better Decisions in Life and Work. Dan Heath, Chip’s brother, is also an accomplished individual who is known for the books he has written with his brother, Chip Heath. Dan Heath has an MBA from Harvard Business School and is an entrepreneur who co-founded a publishing company named Thinkwell.

In the book Made to Stick, aside from the main principles, there are recurring themes that are introduced throughout the book to reinforce an example’s idea. One of these themes is the Curse of Knowledge, a cognitive bias that inhibits communication effectiveness which results in a lack of empathy for audiences who do not know what the communicator knows. This concept was introduced and explained in Made to Stick, and I will be using this idea to explain how the Curse of Knowledge creates the communication barrier of translating an idea in our minds to words.

I can combine the information from this annotated bibliography to develop my argument in Major Assignment #2. The three processes of communication— translating an idea to words, delivering the words, and having the receiver interpret the words is a process that will be examined using the information gathered from these sources. I will use the idea of the Curse of Knowledge from Made to Stick and the ideas in “What Comes First: Ideas or Words?” by Eli Alshanetsky to explain how we can improve our translation from ideas to words with empathy and understanding of the mind in a philosophical context. I will use the ideas of nonverbal communication and how it affects an audience’s understanding of a communicated message. Lastly, I will use the idea of perceptual filters and the science of how perception and information processing works to determine how we can improve our ability to communicate with others by understanding how people perceive information in messages.