Words I Know by Heart

Entry #4 - Effective Communication

Okay I shall make a quick post. Well, in today’s tutorial class, basically I’ve learnt about the characteristics of an effective corporate blog. To analyse and evaluate its effectiveness, we first need to comprehend the context of the blog; the purpose/intended message and audience. Knowing these would then make it clearer to analyse the effectiveness of the blog.

Another thing I’ve learnt today is organisation of ideas. Sometimes the intended message may not be clear to the audience simply because of the way the ideas are organised. Therefore, similar to organizing ideas in academic writing, it is equally important to deliver ideas well in blog too. This will greatly facilitate audience’s understanding of the intended message. 

Entry #3 - Effective Communication

In the 3rd tutorial class of effective communication, I’ve learnt about the important features of thesis statement. It’s actually quite simple to draft out the thesis statement. I just have to bear in mind that thesis statement should be in the introduction part of the essay, and it serves to inform the readers about the scope of topics covered in the essay. An essay with no clear and well-defined thesis statement is likely to fail. Also, it’s crucial that issues discussed in the body paragraphs should be parallel with the thesis and irrelevant issues should be omitted out. Apart from thesis statement, the organisation of the body paragraphs is equally important. Every paragraph (depending on how you want to organise it) should address an issue only. Stick close to the claim (topic sentence) made and provide sufficient supporting details. Always ensure that the issues covered is within the scope set by the thesis statement. This would also ensure that you’re not writing out of point. So that’s it! Important take away: Clear and well-defined thesis statement, good organisation of body paragraphs, and writing within the scope set by thesis statement. This should be of great help in my assignment 1. 

Entry #2 - Effective Communication

In today’s tutorial, we analysed three pieces of writing which were written by the same author but at different stages of his life; when he was a child, when he was a secondary school student and when he was a student pursuing Doctors of Philosophy. What I have gathered so far through this exercise is that the content of the writings were roughly the same just that the presentation and organisation of ideas as well as the language features used differ at different level of maturity. Components of communication such as the context, purpose and participants were analysed in the three writings and I observed that these components influence the language features used to convey the intended message. Take for example the piece of writing by a child, the psychological context in this case refers to the mindset of a typical child, which in this case may be attributed as being innocent and jovial. Whereas the social context may consist of a student-teacher relationship. Thus, considering these contexts discussed, it would be no surprise to observe that the organisation and presentation of the content, and the language features to reflect that of a child. Compare this with another writing done when the author was pursuing his PhD. Obviously, there’s a great difference in terms of level of maturity and given a set of different contexts this time, one would expect a more sophisticated language features being used and a more organised and well-presented ideas in the content of the writing. So having said that, I would like to stress again that contexts has its role in influencing the way we communicate. Also, effective communication is relative to the contexts. For instance, we do not expect a child to write professionally with almost perfect sentence structures and whose audience in this case is the child’s teacher. Similarly, we expect an undergraduate to produce a report that reflects his level of maturity and also one that reflects his awareness of context.

The second exercise required us to form a 5 lettered-word from the letters “L”, “U”, “W”, “A” and “E”. Well most of us had some difficulty forming a word and that’s because no word can be formed using those letters. However, some of us manage to form a word later and that word is “camel”. This exercise was carried out to help us understand the concept of selection in communication and thus its effect on our perception. Most of us couldn’t notice that the letter “U” could be a letter “C” and the letter “W” could be a letter “M”. This is because of the way we select information. We only notice stuffs that are usual to us and we tend to reject those that are not familiar to us or beyond our norms. This would also mean that our interpretations are somewhat rigid in a way because of how we only select and therefore notice certain stuffs around us. Consequently, our perspective can be quite narrow. This would pose a threat to effective communication because misunderstandings could sometimes occur due to our misinterpretations. Well, actually the problem lies in oneself. We have the ethical responsibility to label or organise a phenomena and when we label something with words such as “Ohh, he’s rude”, it’s because we choose to perceive him as being rude and just by doing that, we would be more attentive of his negative behavior than his other positive behaviors. The way we communicate we him would also be different due to our perception of him. Therefore, to improve the way we perceive about other people, we need to avoid mind reading, check perceptions with others, distinguishing facts from inferences and judgments, and monitor self-serving bias.