Assignment 4: Creating Effective Messages

Creating Effective Messages When people are having a conversation, they are doing so in two ways, nonverbal messages and verbal messages. Everyone does both forms of communication at the same all the time, even when they don't know it. It is the person who is telling another person something yet his or her body is saying the exact opposite. This is when verbal and nonverbal messages differ. If someone has both verbal and nonverbal communication in line, one would be more willing to believe his or her words and what he or she is communicating.
I am not big on watching television. However, to complete this week’s assignment I had to watch a television sitcom. I knew that Seinfeld was a show that people liked to watch,
The characters in this sitcom were Jerry, Kramer, Elaine, and George. In this episode George, Elaine and Jerry were having lunch and Jerry was discussing a dream that he had the night before. Jerry had awakened in the middle of the night and wrote a joke down on a piece of paper. He wrote the joke down hoping that perhaps he could use it in one of his standup shows. Meanwhile, George was slicing a cucumber into his salad that he had brought from his home to the restaurant. Elaine watched George slicing the cucumber into his salad with a very confused look on her face. George reading Elaine’s expression explained that he brought his own cucumber because the restaurant does not put cucumber in their salads and he could not eat a salad without cucumbers. Jerry was still trying to figure out what he wrote down from his dream. At that same time, George grabbed is chest and had a scared look on his face. Jerry and Elaine were not in fact
Jerry was disregarding George’s heart attack as if this were something that George had done in the past that turned out to be nothing. Elaine was also very nonchalant about George having a heart attack. I believe that they may have taken George more seriously had this not happened before. George’s way of handling these situations has led Jerry and Elaine to fail to take anything he says seriously. It was apparent that George was in pain, he had his hand against his chest and he was telling Jerry and Elaine that he thinks he is having a heart attack. The message he was sending both verbally and nonverbally should have told Jerry and Elaine that he was not