Final Reflection

When you open your mouth, just within few seconds people start judging you. That is why I think verbal communication is important and my final reflection will be on this.

Think before you say.

Communication is about to deliver the message effectively across, that is why we need to be sure about what we are trying to deliver in order to transmit the message accurately. Moreover, it is always better to think the ideas in the point form, so that when you speak, you will not easily lose yourself. Personally, I feel that it is also a good practice to say the ideas in a concise way and avoid repetition. As nowadays we are all very busy and involved in a lot of things simultaneously, and our listeners’ attention normally is short. Audience is more willing to hear the result rather than the whole story given the time limit.

Be confident and smile

Personal charisma usually can attract more attention and audience. Although charisma is something that we are born with and difficult to improve, I still feel that there is also one way that can help us in attracting the audience. That is to be confident and to give smiles. We need to have strong faith in what we are saying and do not be afraid of making mistakes. Practice makes perfect. That is also applicable to verbal communication where conversations in our daily lives are our practice fields. These conversations include talking in front of non-friends or relative large audience, like discussion in our es2007 class. The more we practice the more confident we will get, and the better we will become in the verbal communication.

Minimize stereotyping and be a good listener

We need to minimize our stereotyping when we communicate.  Stereotyping not only exist in the inter-cultural communication, but even within your closest friends. The stereotype I am talking about is the pre-judgment that we have before we communicate.  In Chinese, there is an old saying: a person can change a lot with three days. Therefore, it is always a good practice to listen the message from other parties carefully before forming the replies in our minds to avoid potential miscommunication.

At last, I really want to thank all of you, especially Brad. I have enjoyed the module a lot. It has been a pleasure to exchange feedbacks or opinions with you guys both inside and outside the class. I cannot be more agreed with Brad the importance of feedback in a learning process.  And Brad, you always give me your critical comments with an encouraging tone, in which it has boosted up my morale in learning professional communication and English language.  Within so many years in Singapore, all the English relating subjects’ teachers/facilitators/tutors I have met were all very institutional style and discouraging.  (:P)

Reflection of proposal presentation

I will break down my reflection into 3 main parts namely content, script and bring it out.

Firstly content, I strongly feel that a presentation will be half-success if the content itself is great.  A strong content is like the foundation, only with a good foundation, so that we could develop more interesting and sounding aspects for the presentation. This time round, I was presenting the same part that I contributed to the project proposal, and my group mates and I edited the part for several times before handed in. That is why I feel quite comfortable with the content I was going to present then.

Secondly it is the script. During the dry run, when I was presenting based on the materials that I wrote on the proposal, and I did not do much change to it. The feedback was not good. I felt that I was losing the attention of my audience shortly after I started. Moreover, Brad was also telling us that, presentation was actually a selling process in which we should add more our personal staff in order to make it lively. Furthermore, Brad kept emphasizing the importance of a pitch in a presentation, thus I decided to write a new script based on the content but entirely restructured and rephrased in a more interesting  way, and add in interesting staff like personal experience that I thought could be able to catch my audience’s attention.

Thirdly, bring it out. It is basically about internalizing all the materials and practicing with the group mates and on my own.  This time round I adapted the approach of memorizing the outline rather than memorizing the whole script. It is an effective way for me to avoid blank in mind when I am on stage.  Moreover, by internalizing the outline, I was more fluent in the presentation. Although I use very simple and daily language, I felt that a natural flow of the presentation is more important than good sentence structures or good choice of words.  

Last but not least, I would like to thank everyone who was there in my presentation, as your guys were really supportive. Without your attention, I would not be able to do it in a comfortable way.