Reflections

Communication, I believe, is a subject that requires lifelong learning as well as continual practice. It is not something that we can just learn within the four corners of a classroom and expect ourselves to be experts at it after 13 weeks. We need to take what we have learned in class into the outside world and apply it in different situations in our daily lives, so that we can sharpen our communication skills.

While taking this module did not “magically” transform me into an expert in communication, this module has however provided me with a solid foundation to build and develop my communication skills. Before I took this module, I was completely clueless on how to write a proper business letter, an effective job application letter or a well-structured resume. After taking this module, I must admit that I still have not completely mastered the skills needed to write all those documents impressively. However, this module has provided me with insights on how I could improve these skills, which I believe will come in handy when I begin applying for jobs after I graduate.

Apart from that, the interaction that I had with my classmates through in-class discussions and blogging helped me to view many aspects of communication from a different angle besides my own. For instance, the blog post on the usage of capital letters in written communication (by Chau Ting, I believe) made me realized that how I understand a particular writing may be totally different from how another person understands it. I always thought that people would understand the usage of capital letters exactly the same way that I do.

In addition to that, I have also been able to gain knowledge through this module regarding intercultural communication. Honestly, the only culture that I knew about before this was the Chinese culture (and maybe some Western culture also). My ignorance about other culture led me to believe that many of my own personal practices (such as the “OK” hand gesture) are universally accepted by all. This module has taught be that this is not actually so. I am thankful that I have the opportunity to correct my ignorance now, then having to correct it later in my working life at the expense of embarrassing myself or offending someone else.

Suffice to say, after completing this module, effective communication skills has become something that is more valuable to more. Even before taking this module, I have already seen effective communication skills as somewhat important but after completing this module, the deeper understanding that I gained about communication skills has given deeper meaning and certainly more value to it. Learning more about a subject adds value to the subject. This is why I intend to continue learning more about communication, especially after this module served as a good starting point.

Overall, taking this module has been a pleasant experience for me and I would like to seize this opportunity to thank Mrs. Fiona Richardson and my fellow classmates for their constructive feedback. I wish all of you all the best in your future endeavours even as all of you continue pursuing your dreams and ambitions. May God bless all of you!!!

Biodata

Alvin is currently a third year Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISE) undergraduate student at the National University of Singapore (NUS). He is expected to graduate in 2010 with a Second Lower Class Honours Bachelor of Engineering degree.

Alvin considers it a privilege to be enrolled into ISE as this course has provided the opportunity for him to acquire useful knowledge in manufacturing processes as well as systems optimization. He has been able to gain insight into how manufacturing industries actually operate in real life and he believes that such knowledge will be of great aid to him in his future career.

Among all the different areas of specialization in ISE, Alvin has chosen to specialize in Quality Planning & Management. This is because he has plans to research on reliability modeling and experimental designs to improve on product quality as well as to optimize the processes involved during the production stage.

During his free time, Alvin enjoys listening to music. He has no specific preference on which type of music he likes as he generally enjoys all of them. Besides that, he loves surfing the internet also as he can keep himself updated on the latest ideas and discoveries.

So far Alvin has not had much travelling experiences but he intends to travel around the world sometime in the future. He would especially love to visit America as well as the European countries.

The Complexity of Parent-Child Communication

I am sure most of us have experienced some of these scenarios before:

• Our parents scolding us for spending so much of money even though we believed that we did not do so. We repeatedly explain ourselves to them but they just do not seem to understand. As a result, we feel that it is pointless to explain anything to them, and we extend this perception to every disagreement that we have with them.
• Our parents nagging us for not doing the housework, even though we have already informed them that we have an exam the following day, apart from the numerous projects that we have to complete.
• Sometimes when our parents asked us to do something and we happened to be busy at the moment, we tell them that we would do it later. For some reason, they kept on insisting that we do it now, instead of later, and we just could not understand what the hurry is.
• Some of our fathers, the moment they come back from work, would either sit in front of the television or read the newspapers. It is as if they are not interested to talk to us at all. When we ask them questions, they tell us to ask our mothers.
• Most of find it awkward to show affection to our parents, particularly our fathers. Hugging them is like the strangest thing that you could do.

When we were still in our diapers and we have yet to learn how to talk, we communicated with our parents through hugs, kisses and even tears sometimes. When we started saying our first words, our parents were so excited we called them "mama" and "papa". As we continue growing up, our verbal skills kept on developing and some of us would talk so much that our parents wished that we could just keep quiet for awhile. Then we hit adolescence - and all the hugs, kisses and even talking stopped. The moment we return from school, we go straight to our rooms, shut the door and turn on the computer.

So what actually happened here? How did our communication with our parents reached such a stage? When we still small and could not even speak properly, we communicated more with our parents. Then when we grew up and our verbal skills developed, we communicated with them less. It seems that at some point in our lives, which we do not know exactly when, some invisible barrier is formed between us and our parents. This barrier became a hindrance to our communication with them. Even when we do try to talk to them, we always end up feeling that they just do not understand what we are saying and as a result, we give up the idea of telling them anything at all. Here we learn that better verbal skills does not necessarily guarantee better communication.

Besides that, this barrier also creates a sense of distance between us and our parents. Hugs and kisses, which we used to do when we were little, became awkward. Have we asked ourselves, ever since when it became awkward? Why should it be unusual for us to show affection to those who raised and brought us up? Showing affection, I believe, is one of the most effective ways of communicating your love to those whom you really care about. There may be times when someone tells us that they love us and we just do not feel convinced initially. However, their actions, especially the little things that they do for us, proves their sincerity and we feel touched by them. More often than not, these little non-verbal acts speak and communicate a great volume of how much we really care about someone.

All in all, I just want to conclude by saying that no matter what communication barriers there may be between you and your parents, they can always be overcomed by this thing called initiative. Whether verbal or non-verbal, formal or non-formal, communication is a powerful tool in conveying what is really in our hearts and minds to one another, so make use of it today to tell not only your parents but your loved ones how much you really love them and how much they mean to you. If you do not communicate it to them, they may never know.

Evaluating Intercultural Behavior

X was going to meet her boyfriend's grandparents in China for the first time. Since she was not a Chinese, she did not really possess any knowledge about the Chinese culture and traditions. However, her Chinese friends told her that in China, it is important that you bring along a gift whenever you are visiting someone, as a sign of respect to the host.

So she decided to go to the gift shop to see if she could find something there. While she was at the gift shop, she saw this small, unique-looking antique clock. Fascinated by the clock, she decided to purchase it as a gift. She asked the shop assistant to wrap up the gift.

As she walking out the store, she saw a fruit stall along the road. She thought that it would be a good idea to bring along some fruits as well to visit her boyfriend's grandparents. So she purchased four pears.

Later on her boyfriend picked her up and they went to his grandparents' home together. His grandparents greeted them and were very excited to meet their grandson's girlfriend for the first time. X then proceed to take the wrapped gift and the four pears from her bag. When they saw the fruits, their facial expressions changed immediately. The smiles disappeared from their faces. X wondered if something was wrong.

As X passed the wrapped gift to her boyfriend's grandmother, her grandmother heard some ticking sound from it. Immediately she asked X whether it was a clock. X said yes. The grandmother became very angry and started scolding X. X was shocked.

After reading the story above, some of you may be wondering what was wrong with the gift, as well as the fruits. Let me begin with the fruits first. There was actually nothing wrong with the fruits, but there was something wrong with the number of fruits. Chinese people do not believe in giving anything in sets of four, as four is considered an "unlucky" number since the pronunciation of four in the Chinese language sounds like "death".

As for the gift, Chinese people will always avoid giving clocks because the phrase "giving a clock as a gift", when pronounced in the Chinese language, sounds like "wishing someone's death". However, this does not apply to watches, only clocks.

This particular story clearly illustrates the importance of knowing and understanding the culture and traditions of other people because we do not want to get caught in circumstances where we unknowingly or unintentionally upset the other party, as this may result in serious consequences. In a real working environment, we may actually lose a crucial business deal or offend someone important due to our ignorance of their culture.

Business Correspondence Critique

A few months back, I received this e-mail in my account, marked as "highly important". Here are the details:

From: Sankhala, Suresh Singh
Sent: Monday, July 18, 2008 12:48 PM
Subject: UK Requirement

Dear Friend,

Please do not take this for a junk letter. Bill Gates is sharing his fortune. If you ignore this you will repent later. Microsoft and AOL are now the largest Internet companies and in an effort to make sure that Internet Explorer remains the most widely used program, Microsoft and AOL are running an e-mail beta test. When you forward this e-mail to friends, Microsoft can and will track it (if you are a Microsoft Windows user) for a two week time period. For every person that you forward this e-mail to, Microsoft will pay you $245.00, for every person that you sent it to that forwards it on, Microsoft will pay you $243.00 and for every third person that receives it, you will be paid $241.00. Within two week! s, Microsoft will contact you for your address and then send you a cheque.

And now I shall present my analysis on this e-mail:

Firstly, if you noticed, the subject is written as "UK Requirement", which had absolutely nothing to do with the content of the e-mail in any way.

Secondly, it was not appropriate for the sender to address me as "Dear Friend", as I do not even know the sender nor have I even heard of him. I believe we all agree that the usage of a more formal tone is recommended when communicating with someone for the first time.

Now as for the content of the e-mail, it obviously does not follow all 7Cs of writing. To begin with, the sender should introduce himself first and state who or which organization he is representing since he is a complete stranger to me. The objective of his e-mail was also not stated at all in the first two lines.

The next flaw that I want to point out is the language used. The grammar and vocabulary used is simply inappropriate. For instance, it is stated in the e-mail that "If you ignore this you will repent later." I know it must sound kind of funny right now, but the right word to use should be "regret" and not "repent". The tone and phrasing of that particular sentence is also too strong; if the sender really has something useful to share, maybe he can write something like "Do read on further as I believe the information below will greatly benefit you."

Besides that, the content of the e-mail itself lacks both completeness and concreteness. No details are provided regarding the "e-mail beta test" or why is it being run. There is no further information concerning how this whole "payment scheme" will work as well. The recipient of such an e-mail will not know how Microsoft will "track" them down and deposit money into their bank account. Moreover, even if this e-mail was really genuine, the sender should have attached reliable sources or links for the recipient to refer to.

Apart from that, under normal circumstances, the sender should have provided his contact details (Although we probably could figure out why he didn't in this case).

On the whole, if we look at the overall format of the e-mail (even if we ignore the content), somehow the mail looked as if it had been prepared really sloppily. Although it is short, appropriate paragraphing will make this mail a whole lot easier to read. Last but not least, he did not even bother to end the mail with "Yours Faithfully" or "Yours Sincerely" and sign off with his name as well as job position.

Let me conclude by saying that reading this e-mail in the very first place was not a very prudent way to use my precious time.

Resolving Interpersonal Conflict

X had always been very different from other children. From a very young age, he displayed extraordinary intelligence. He could somehow understand almost everything at a quicker pace and that enabled him to pick up both language and mathematical skills with ease. Apart from that, he also possessed an incredibly high memory capacity where he was able to not only remember many things, he could memorize things which are highly complex in nature as well. But what was most amazing about X was that even at a very young age of 4, he could already start reasoning things out and tried to make sense of the world around him.

Unfortunately, his parents did not realize that their child was somewhat gifted (or more advanced than other children, if you prefer to call it that). They brought him up as if he was just an ordinary child and did not cater to a lot of his mental, emotional and psychological needs accordingly. As a result, the child grew up constantly feeling that his parents never understood him at all, leading to increasing feelings of resentment towards his parents. On several occasions, he tried to drop some hints concerning what he was feeling deep down inside but his parents could not picked them up at all. He wanted to tell them directly but just could not find the words to express his emotions. After all, he was still a child and did not know how to talk to grown ups about such complicated and somewhat awkward matters.

During his teenage years, he frequently quarreled with his parents about almost everything. One fine day, X requested for additional pocket money from his father since he wanted to buy a book that he really liked. Now his father was financially strapped that particular month. Coupled with a long stressful day at work, his father was really in a terrible mood. He scolded X for always spending so much of money and told him very sharply that it was a NO. X then got mad, perceiving that his father was once again being “un-understanding” towards him as usual. He slammed the door after his father left the room. His father, seeing that action as being disrespectful kicked the door open and shouted very loudly at X. X yelled back and soon a shouting match started. Fortunately, X's mother intervened and stopped both parties from taking it any farther. After that incident, X was badly shaken and felt hatred for his father. He contemplated running away from home for a few days just to give his parents a scare. After all, his parents had never really realized that they did not understand him and maybe doing something drastic might just be the thing to get their attention.

If you were in X's shoes, what will you do?

Effective Communication Skills

I believe most of us have played the game "Broken Telephone" before. To refresh your memories, this is the game where the players line up and a message is passed from the first person to the second, then from the second person to the third person, and so on until the message reaches the very last person. That person will then read out the message that was passed to him/her and as we all know, the message has either very little or has completely no resemblance to the original. Somehow, as the message gets passed on from one individual to another, it gets "distorted" even though no one actually has any intention of doing so. So what went wrong? I believe most of us, if not all of us would attribute this problem primarily to communication breakdown.

Communication breakdown, undoubtedly, is the product of inffective communication between the parties involved. The whole purpose of communication, I believe, is simply to convey a message across to the parties of interest and if the message is not understood the way that it should be, then it has not served its intended purpose. Now this is where effective communication skills comes into play - these skills prevent any misunderstanding or misintepretation of the message that is being delivered.

In about a year's time, I'll be graduating from the Faculty of Engineering. There is definitely going to be a huge amount of competition from my peers during the job-seeking process. From my perspective, what would help me stand out from my peers, especially in the preparation of a resume as well as my manner of conduct during job interviews, is effective communication skills. I'm pretty sure we have all heard stories where people with lower academic qualifications were chosen over those with better academic qualifications for a particular job because somehow or other, such people were able to make themselves appear "more appealing" during job interviews. They effectively convince the interviewer that they were much more suited for the job position. They effectively convince the interviewer to "buy" what they were saying. They effectively behaved the right way and said the right things at the right place and at the right time. They effectively communicated their message across.

Apart from that, developing effective communication skills also enhances my listening skills - an ability that is so vital yet often neglected. Whenever the word "communication" is mentioned, most people tend to associate it merely speaking skills. For instance, they are concerned with how they could talk a client into buying their product or engaging their services. Or how they should be presenting their proposal at a business meeting. In all these situations, the majority of people would ask themselves, "What should I say?" or "How should I say it?" Due to the enormous amout of emphasis placed on oratory skills, people end up forgetting about listening. Listening, in my opinion, is one of the most crucial channel for us to receive input that could potentially make life a whole lot easier for us. Think about the situation when we are meeting with a potential client. Sometimes we get so caught up trying to persuade the potential client with our words that we do not listen to his/her words. By ignoring his/her words, we may actually be ignoring his/her needs, his/her feelings, and so forth. The final outcome? We could possibly lose some big business here. If only we had stopped to listen to our client, we could have understood him/her better and thus be able to "connect" with him/her. Such a "connection" strengthens business relationships which will in the long run prove to be beneficial. Clients or customers generally love it when their opinions are HEARD, payed attention to and valued. ( If you had realized, poor listening skills also contributed significantly to the communication breakdown mentioned in the "Broken Telephone" example above. )

Before I end this post, I would like to share a very interesting quotation from William Butler Yeats, a 20th century Irish poet and dramatist. It goes like this: "Think like a wise man but speak in the language of the people."