The Construct

As far as organizational communication goes, this is one question that many a communicator should always take into account. Place oneself into the target audience’s shoes and ask, “What’s in it for me?”

Whenever I teach business communication, the part on which I give most emphasis always is communication planning and audience analysis. The problem with some writing manuals is that they prescribe the “best” formats and step-by-step processes failing to take into account the various communicative contexts.

For example, many writing manuals would prescribe the up-front format – a brief and concise format that begins with the summary of the message. While this does work effectively in most business organizations, I have observed that some more traditional organizations would prefer a more academic format – the one with the typical intro-body-conclusion structure. It’s always a choice on what format would probably better suit specific contexts.

Everyone in the organization has his or her own politics to consider. The simple existence of management and subordinates and yes-men and rebels in organizations are a testament to that. It often hard to identify these from an outsider’s perspective. However, for internal communication, one can have a fairly easy time through continuous observation.

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Thanks to J. Angelo for his insight regarding my previous post.

It is quite true that one of the problems that Philippine-based call centers face is the crop of young graduates who are really capable of communicating with customers.

As M.A.K. Halliday has proposed in his Systemic-Functional Linguistics, communication always has a context. This can simply be illustrated by the word “mouse.” This word can easily change its meaning if used between pest exterminators and between computer geeks.

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