Six Major Obstacles To Effective Business Communication

Six Major Obstacles to Effective Business Communication
The class book insists, "To avoid obstacles to communication we should avoid clichés, jargon, slang, sexist and racist language, euphemisms, and doublespeak" (Business Communication, 2012, p. 63). Let us define each of them and see how they can serve us a bad service and, maybe we will find them useful in rare circumstances.
The first obstacle to communication is Clichés. Cliché merely is a hackneyed phrase. The course book adds that "cliché phrase that has lost its impact through overuse (Business Communication, 2012, p. 58). I partly agree with the statement given in the course book. Of course, if our speech will be full with clichés like "tired old warhorse", "the shoe was on the other

Sexist and racist language is the language, which uses determination by gender or race feature to discriminate a person or a group of people. Inasmuch as we are living in the multipolar and multicultural world, each of us has to comprehend that, there is no place for sexist and racist language in the business environment. Because of that, I cannot provide any real example of using sexist and racist language in my business communications. However, I can give a bit funny example from our Russian way of using words. The word businessman is tightly ingrained in our language. Even though speakers, mentioning a woman, try calling her a businesswoman or a business lady, it is quite appropriate to say, "She is a lucky and successful

Like slang, euphemisms in a language are using for changing ordinary words to other ones. However, euphemisms are regular words as well, but "they have negative, offensive, controversial, or unacceptable coloring" (Business Communication, 2012, p. 61). I can agree that we can use euphemisms during a casual conversation with our close colleagues. A reader can consider it as my own example of business communication, but I want to underline - relaxed and unconcerned business communication. However, like for the third and fourth obstacles, there is no place for euphemisms in serious business communication. Of course, there are some exceptions when politeness is higher than calling a spade a spade. Yes, instead of writing, "calling something as it is", I decided to use a cliché. I hope I did not go too