IMPROVE YOUR COMMUNICATION SKILLS
Effective communications can result in:
- enhanced client services
- higher profits
- improved interactions with clients, coworkers, and suppliers
- workplace concerns are far more easily resolved
- Getting your point across
Discover how to organise your sentences so that the recipient will understand what you’re saying.
Your professional and personal relationships can both benefit from better communication, which can also help your career prospects. Companies need candidates that can successfully communicate across a wide range of media and target audiences.
Your life can be improved in a variety of ways by effective communication skills. You can learn to establish more productive relationships with friends, family, coworkers, suppliers, and clients if people can understand what you are trying to say.
Lesson Structure
There are 8 lessons in this course:
- Introduction
- Problems with Poor Communication
- Barriers to Effective Communication
- Giving Instructions
- Evaluating Instructions or Orders
- Types of Communication
- What is Appropriate Communication
- Passive, aggressive and assertive Communication
- Listening
- Obstacles to Listening
- Empathic Listening
- Ways to Indicate You are Listening
- Informative Language
- Persuasive Language
- Imaginative Language
- Literal Language
- Figurative Language
- Formal Language
- Colloquial Language
- Communication Channels
- Language Skills
- Reviewing your Writing
- Evaluating your Writing
- Concise Wording
- Condensing your Writing
- Common Problems contributing to Lack of Conciseness
- Clear Wording
- Making Meanings Clear
- Causes of Confusion; homophones, malapropisms, colloquial meanings, ambiguity
- Simplicity
- Writing Skills
- Where Writing Skills are Used
- Writing for a Purpose
- Determining the Purpose
- Knowing Your Reader
- Guidelines for Effective Writing
- Language
- Planning What You Write
- Business Letters
- Writing a Business Letter
- Other Types of Business Documents
- Writing Themes
- Types of Themes: analogy, chronological theme
- Common Grammatical Errors to Avoid
- Punctuation
- Developing Writing Skills
- Writing Fundamentals
- Improving a Piece of Writing
- Newspaper Writing
- Concise Wording
- Magazine Articles
- Visual Communications
- Hand outs
- Visual Materials; illustration, charts
- Digital Technology
- Digital Applications; Graphics, CAD, Multi media, Internet, etc.
- Public Speaking
- Audio Aids
- Recorded Presentations
- Speaking in Public
- Principles of Public Speaking
- Selling
- Committee Meetings
- Functions of a Meeting
- Conducting a Committee Meeting
- Role of Office Bearers
- Taking Minutes in a Meeting
Each lesson culminates in an assignment which is submitted to the school, marked by the school’s tutors and returned to you with any relevant suggestions, comments, and if necessary, extra reading.
Aims
- Describe how communication works.
- Describe the many communication strategies that are used.
- Concise and exact language usage should be displayed.
- Describe the value of writing as a powerful tool for communication.
- Write well and use writing as a tool for communication.
- Explain the various visual communication techniques and how they are typically utilised to convey information.
- Get ready to communicate verbally effectively.
- Organize committee conferences.
A Good Place to Start for Improved Communication Is with Clarity
- How well can a concept be expressed verbally?
- How well do people who hear words understand them?
It is possible to misinterpret these two points while communicating an idea from one person to another.
Observe these guidelines when putting thoughts into words:
1. Employ terminology that the recipient will recognise.
2. Use the word in the context of your communication, making it obvious what it is about, if you want the recipient to interpret a known word with a new meaning. Use a footnote if necessary.
3. If you want to use an unknown word, be sure to explain what it means.
CLEARING UP MEANINGS
There are three ways to do this:
1. Examples in Context
To give a term “one” set meaning, it is said, then a paragraph or sentence is added. For instance, the statement “He was hot in the desert” means little unless you can show just how hot it was!
He succumbed to the heat in the desert, shrivelled up, and died.
The example in this sentence has placed the word hot in a situation that eliminates other interpretations of the word as being somewhat uncomfortable but not life threatening.
2. Glossing
An explanation of a term was originally written as a gloss in the margin. Nowadays, we either use footnotes or immediately follow the term being explained with the remark in brackets.
3. Specifying
Classifying something by describing it in a way that distinguishes it from everything else in existence is the process of definition. A ball, for instance, is a spherical, three-dimensional object.
CONFUSION CAUSERS
Homophones are words with similar sounds but different spellings. There and their are a few examples, along with complement and compliment, principal and principal, stationary and stationery.
Words used incorrectly because they sound similar are called malapropisms. An illustration would be that rose hip syrup can be used to obliterate a cold rather than to treat it.
Colloquial meanings are newer interpretations of a term that are not part of its original meaning. “Catch up” on the most recent news, for instance, or the new lad at school is “square.”
Ambiguity
Sentence structure affects how additional words are used with it (particularly words which they are written next to). As a result, the same term may have two meanings. These additional meanings frequently surface without the writer being aware of them. To get rid of such words, go through your writing sentence by sentence.
Causes of uncertainty
1. Vague pronoun references
For instance, boil the meal if it isn’t hot enough for the dog.
It has not been made clear that the meal should be boiled by the usage of the pronoun “it.” If you’ve misinterpreted, you might have thought the dog has to be boiled.
2. The proximity rule is disregarded
Example: The woman with the red hat came in the doorway pulling a puppy.
3. Inappropriate placement of adverbs.
Example: He got lucky.
or He won, fortunately.
Four. Poor punctuation
Example: The young age of the boy prevented him from being chosen.
Or
Due to his youth, the boy was not selected.
It’s unclear in the first statement whether he was or was not picked. He might not have been selected due to his youth, or he might have been selected but for another factor.
He was clearly not picked, as the comma in the second phrase reveals.
5. Ambiguous language
Those that take this course will gain:
administrators, office personnel, managers, and those who frequently write in their daily lives.
sales personnel who deal directly with customers, both in B2B and B2C settings.
amateur and aspiring authors looking to strengthen their foundations or develop their self-confidence.
English language learners who want to enhance their written fluency and communication abilities for employment and school.
You will learn to communicate more effectively after completing this course. Discover how to communicate clearly and effectively in writing.
- Identify the various parts of speech
- Learn to communicate more successfully.
- Compose everything from ordinary emails to work reports effectively and simply.
