Sunday, August 23, 2009

Why effective communication skills is important for me

Effective communication skills are essential in our life. When you talk to your professor, when you communicate with your interviewer, when you talk to your colleagues, it will make your life easier. However, the skills not only include speaking, but also listening, reading and writing.

Talking about speaking, this week we have read about asking questions effectively, a bad question may ruined the conversation, this is very important when we are doing an interview or a talk with our professors.

Secondly, about listening skills, usually we thought we have heard all the things and knows everything, but actually we can only remember 25-50% of the contents we heard after less than 10 minutes.

Moreover, effectively reading is also important. It may not be essential when we make a conversation, but when we prepared for an interview, it is crucial. If we couldn’t effectively read all the materials, or we have understood wrongly about the material, we may ruin our opportunities.

Last but not least, writing skills. If we couldn’t write effectively, for example we couldn’t satisfy the 7C’s. There may produce a lot of misunderstandings in our reports or essays.

I have to say none of the four skills is perfect for me; some of them are even not good. For instance, sometimes for me, I can only remember 10% of the things I heard, even worse is that none of those is the key points. Moreover, as a graduating student, I’m going to the workplace in less than a year. Communicate effectively with others will make my life easier. Due to the reasons above, effective communication skills is important for me.

9 comments:

  1. Good post. Easy to read, understand and straight to the point you wanted to convey.

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  2. Your blog make me share the same thoughts as you do especially when you mention about remembering the 10%. In lectures, sometimes it's hard to remember what the lecturer had said and making sure the important notes are taken down.

    In addition, your blog is consistent and I also like the last paragraph where you mention about your thoughts.

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  3. Some errors in your post I think, just some minor errors perhaps you missed them while typing your string of thoughts.

    4th paragraph, you should keep to "Thirdly" since you used "Secondly" in the previous paragraph. "Moreover" should be used to emphasize the same point but your third paragraph is a new point already.

    Some grammatical errors in the last paragraph. "remember 10% of the things I have heard", "communication skills are important for me".

    Overall, I agree to what you say. I too, can only remember about 10% of what is said to me sometimes. I blame it on age most of the time. Tee hee.

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  4. Hi DanHua,

    you have fuifilled most of the 7Cs required of you.
    But i would like to point out that you may have overlooked on these 2Cs,
    Correctness: some sentence structure in 4th n 5th para
    Conciseness: the 2nd para is too long a sentence---> maybe you want to shorten it.
    Overall, you touch on the various aspects of effective communication and i agreed with you on how it may be important to you as a graduating student.
    Thanks and i look forward to see your upcoming posts.

    Gail

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  5. Greetings,

    May i know what is wrong with the sentence of "remember 10% of the things I have heard" and "communication skills are important for me"?

    Remember 10% of the things "that" i have heard?

    Communication skills are important "to" me?

    Thank you so much for your enlightening.

    Cheers.
    Ryan

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  6. Hi Dan Hua,

    Reading skills should not be thought of as something only applicable to finding out information. It is also about understanding instructions.

    Suppose i have a TV set. If i am not able to read the manual clearly, i may still be able to utilise the TV, but never will i know for sure the full capabilities or potential of how i can make use of it.

    Now, the 7Cs are just guidelines about how to make writing better. Failing to satisfy by part or whole does not make the written piece "bad".

    All in all, the topic is about whether or not, effective communication skills are important "for" us, not "to" us: not professional communicating skills for sure.

    It is to say, even if i break all the 7Cs and write or say something that resembles a code or using "sms-talk", if the other party knows how and by what you are writing something, he is able to understand you perfectly, answer you in a similar way. And you have it, effective communication.

    It takes 2, even if the rest of the world doesnt understand, between the 2, effective communication exist for sure.

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  7. I totally agree with your "remember 10% of the things I've heard". Sometimes our ears are listening but our brains just refuse to work. Unfortunately, it happened once during my interview. The HR manager asked me:"Have you received any compliments on your writing?" At that moment, my mind went blank for no reason. "Hmm... Pardon?" And my interview ended soon. *sigh sigh*

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  8. Hi all,

    Sorry if you have misunderstood my previous post. Those sentences in quotes were sentences that were corrected (or tried) by me.

    Sincerely,
    Pak Ming

    ReplyDelete