Writing Creates Relationships

My latest college course at the University of the People is named Business Communication (it used to be Business English). In the past six weeks, we've explored different forms of written communication and the contexts of written and oral communication. This week, I wanted to share a bit of what I have been learning as it pertains to blogging and WA.

There are eight essential elements of communication:

1. Source: the sender
2. Message: the meaning created by the sender
3. Channel: the email, blog post, conversation, letter, comment, etc.
4. Receiver: the listener or reader
5. Feedback: the receiver's response (conscious or unconscious)
6. Environment: the physical and psychological atmosphere of where the message is sent and received
7. Context: the expectations, scene, and setting of the people involved
8. Interference: noise, anything that distracts the reader or blocks the message.

Interestingly, the element of context (n. 7 above) is broken down into five different categories:

• Intrapersonal (self-talk, thinking, imagining, etc.)
• Interpersonal (communication between two people, like in the image above or in a private message)
• Group (communication between 3 to 8 people, like when you have coffee with a few friends)
• Public (one person communicating to a large group which gives the speaker minimal feedback, like a blog post)
• Mass communication (a message sent to a large audience with even less feedback, like an online newspaper or a television show)

As we can see, all forms of communication establish a relationship between the sender of a message and the receiver. Whenever we write something or talk to someone, we are connecting with another person. So how do we apply this to our blogs?

We need to meet the reader's expectations. I'll analyze this as interpersonal communication because one reader is reading your blog at any given time. Since the reader and the blogger are not in the same physical space at the same time, it's different from a conversation, but that reader can choose to interact by writing a comment and the author's response will be directed at that individual reader.

How do we establish a good relationship with our readers? Well, we create relevant content and provide solutions or advice. We make sure that the part of the environment that we can control (our website) is pleasant and user-friendly. And most importantly, we must try to eliminate as much interference as possible.