Blog Two: Accommodation

In class we talked about communication's need to create a common understanding and to elicit a response.  Chapter 2 discusses how we tend to alter our communication in order to do just this.  I never realized how true it is that we adapt how we says things and what we say to maximize understanding.  Duck/McMahan say that we change the way we say something "to suit an audience or to see changes in feelings or in the relationship that occur during the course of the interaction" (44), meaning that we expect to get a certain response from those we communicate with, and in order to achieve this desired reaction or understanding, we modify our communication to better fit who we are and our relationship to who we are speaking with. I think that this further emphasizes the idea of communication being a relational process because we alter it to accommodate others.  A shared understanding of one another allows a relationship to form and can signal each person's social standing within the relationship.  I feel that I tend to converge and change my way of speaking rather than diverge.  Being a student and on my way to joining the professional world, I try to speak on the same level as professors and employers in an effort to be taken seriously.  My goal is that others understand that I want to be seen as an adult.  This chapter has made me realize how constructed our communication processes can be and their basis on our own image, the image we want others to see, and the relationship between ourselves and others.