The common barriers to effective communication includes: the use of jargon, emotional barriers, lack of attention, lack of interest, distraction, listening, physical barriers and language barriers. The use of jargon may be over complicated as the person you are communicating with be not understand what you are trying to say. The emotional barriers may be that a person may find it difficult to express their emotions while communicating. Distractions include the environment you are in as it may be a noisy environment. Phones may also be a distraction. Physical barrier may include deaf and blind as it may be difficult to communicate. Language barriers may be the misunderstanding of one’s language or accent.

Language and linguistics may be a barrier to effective communication. When communicating with other people in the same language, the vocabulary used in a message may act as barrier if it is not fully understood by the person you are communicating with. The psychological state of the person communicating may influence how the message is sent, received and perceived. For example anger is psychological barrier because when we are angry we say stuff that we will later regret.

Physiological barrier may be the state of a person. For example if someone is slightly deaf, they may not hear everything that you have said resulting a misunderstanding of the conversation. Attitudinal barrier are the attitude or behavior that prevent people from communicating effectively. An effective communicator should also attempt to overcome their own attitudinal barriers in order to make the communication effective. Poor body language is also a barrier to effective communication. Poor body language is when someone has a negative body language while communicating. For example: when someone is communicating with you but gives you no eye contact at all.

There are many barriers at written communication skills. The first barrier is poor spelling. Poor spelling can cause unprofessional image to the reader as it would be difficult to read with so many spelling mistakes. Another barrier is grammar mistakes. Grammar mistake is when most of your sentences don’t make sense and when you do not structure your sentence appropriately. This can create confusion to the reader. A final barrier of written communication skills is irrelevant content. Irrelevant content is when you are writing about something that nothing got to do with the topic. This can cause confusion and misunderstanding to the reader.

How can these barriers be reduced?

There are many ways that potential barriers can be reduced. The first way is that you should learn how to listen. Listening is not the same as hearing as you need to be able to understand the non-verbal communication and how the messages are being spoken.  People running back and forth can cause a lot of distractions. For example: when doing a presentation this can affect the presenter as he could forget what he is talking about so people need to reduce the level of background noises.

Turning off mobile phones can reduce disruptions. This will stop members from looking around to see whose phone went off. If a mobile phone goes off in a workplace, people will get annoyed and disturbed. If the conversation is boring, the person you are communicating with may lack interest which is why you should make the topic interesting.  The speaker must have clear points and interesting topic which will make the listener concentrate all times. Emotional barriers are also a barrier to effective communication. When someone is talking they may not be able to talk as they think they will look stupid. So people tend to do strange things in order to make them feel better and to fit in.

It may be difficult to talk over the phone as you are losing a lot of context and the person cannot see your body language. When you lose the sub-verbal communication, you need to be precise in your messages. Another barrier to effective communication is that if you are doing a podcast your voice may not be loud enough for the audience to hear. To reduce this barrier you will need to make sure your voice is clear and loud.

To reduce poor spelling is by not rushing your work and if you don’t know how to spell check the dictionary or use spell check as it would reduce confusions. Picking the right topic in order to make the listener or audience aware of what you are talking about.  The audience can easily lack interest and get bored easily so it is important to talk about the right topic.