Pitch of communication

Once an audience has been identified, a further factor in successful communication is to

pitch the communication in order to maximize its acceptability to the receiver. The

credibility of the source of information has been shown to be important. Hovland and

Weiss demonstrated early in the fifties how a one-sided presentation, supposedly from

a communist source, was rejected by more of a sample audience than the same

one-sided presentation supposedly from a non-communist source. An over-emphasis of

fear¬raising actors in propaganda likewise increases chances of the message being

rejected, e.g. an excessive emphasis on the effects of lung cancer can cause heavy

smokers to disbelieve that smoking and lung cancer are related.

Considerable work has been done in establishing means of measuring the levels of

difficulty in understanding communication. From the early work of Carrol in 1938, who

demonstrated that intelligence, age, and education were the principal factors involved in

assessing vocabulary range, practical ways of gauging the ease of understanding of

individual communications have been suggested, e.g. readability scales. If a person

attempting to communicate has not determined what he wants to say, there is little

possibility that anyone else will

be able to understand his message without some difficulty.

The clearest communicators are those who develop a sensitivity to both the viewpoint

and the level of comprehension of their audience. Words must be pitched at the correct

level and with the right amount of detail to avoid misunderstandings.

There is evidence that little use is made of the readability scales mentioned above.

British Government booklets on prices and income policies, using these scales, were

‘very difficult’ and ‘dull’. This may be a cause of the comparatively low levels of

understanding Hilde Behrend and her colleagues at the Edinburgh Business School

found with such terms as ‘productivity bargain’.

For the much-pressed manager with little time to spare, a simple test of his ‘readability’

is the degree to which bis communication is listened to or read. Many a company

bulletin goes quickly to the waste-paper bin-the occasional retrieval may show why it

was not read and what the manager should avoid in his communication unless. he wants

his memos to fmish in a bin instead of a file. The manager should assess the degree of

interest he can arouse in his audience and the extent to which he gets his message

across.