Friday, August 22, 2008 7:06 PM
Significance of Effective Communication
Since the day we are born, communication has played an important role in our daily lives. Be it for personal or professional reasons, it is no doubt that communication allows us to better transmit information between one another. Appropriate usage of words and non verbal expressions not only reduces the risk of misunderstandings but also forms the basis of all kinds of relationships.
Throughout our educational period, students are often trained to utilize the verbal and written skills of communication. Writing skills is the most essential part of report writing as it serves to present ideas or results in a clear and concise manner. Professors will not want a report which is ambiguous and beats around the bush since they have tons of scripts to grade. The consequence of such poor writing ability is of course the bad grades that end up in our transcript.
Oral skills are equally as important when we engage in presentations where we have to present the gist of the research findings to our superiors. Imagine a monotonous speaker who takes 30 minutes to enter his main project aims. Audience will gradually lose interest through the presentation process or even fall asleep before the speaker can even touch on his findings.
Furthermore, as we embrace globalization, effective communication skills takes on an even greater significance in our interactions with people of different cultural and religious background. On top of the fundamental verbal and writing skills, it is also essential to extent our knowledge of communication to incorporate such differences. Take the language and cultural differences of Singapore and Japan as an example. Singaporean usually greets others with a simple hello with an occasional handshake. However, hand shake is usually uncommon in Japanese greetings as they usually bow to show respect to one another. Thus, it is yet another aspect of communication that we must acquire if we happen to do any business dealings overseas in the future.
All in all, I would like to end the post with the picture below. Never neglect the power of communication as it might be the missing puzzle to a successful relationship.
Source: http://www.communicationmatters.org.uk/Publications/Videos
/The_Power_of_Communication/the_power_of_communication.html
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