Communication Essentials
Hi Everyone,
You are not required to read any specific material in chapters 4, 5, and 6 of Business Communication Essentials. We do not have a specific discussion task related to any specific parts of those chapter.
However, these three chapters may prove beneficial to you as you encounter the various writing assignments in our class. I have provided the following short video summaries of each chapter to help you see what may be most beneficial for each of these three chapters.
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Hi Everyone,
The following scenario describes a communication situation in a workplace. The situation does not involve writing. Rather, it involves verbal communication.
Feeling rushed by a looming deadline for a report her manager wanted right away, Jory asked Saul to help by getting her some marketing statistics. “I need the figures from the last three years,” she said. “Will that be a problem?”
“Not at all,” Saul replied.
But by mid-day, Saul had still not gotten the statistics to Jory—and her report was due first thing in the morning. Saul was out, so she left him a voicemail: “This is Jory,” she said. “I was wondering, how soon do you think you can get me those stats for the marketing report?”
Two hours later, Jory received an e-mail from Saul: “I’ll have those stats to you the day after tomorrow.”
Jory called Saul again, relieved to find that he was in his office. “Friday’s too late,” she said. “The report’s due tomorrow.”
“Why didn’t you say you needed them so soon?” Saul said. “I’m sorry, but I have to leave in twenty minutes, and I’m at an off-site meeting all day tomorrow.”
Jory thought she had told Saul what she wanted, and Saul thought he had heard her. But no real communication took place in this situation, and now Jory is left without the statistics she needs to complete her report.
Please answer the following questions:
1. What happened in this situation? What did the Sender perceive, and what did the Receiver perceive?
2. Comment on Jory’s priorities and Saul’s priorities. How did they differ, and how did those differences inform this situation?
3. Have you experienced a similar situation in your workplace or community interactions? If so, briefly describe the situation (without divulging people’s names, the names of organizations, etc.) A short paragraph will suffice in answering this question.
4. Assume you are Jory. Please write a memo asking Saul for the information. Don’t worry about the formatting of the memo for this discussion. Simply type the content of your memo to Saul.
Please feel free to interact with others on their answers to any one of these questions.
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The following task is designed to expand your familiarity with UMUC’s Information and Library Service’s OneSearch function. Completing this exercise will also help you as you pursue the research-based report in this class.
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f you would like to, please review the same video tutorial that you watched for our earlier exercise. The tutorial is designed to demonstrate some searching strategies when finding articles in the databases that UMUC subscribes to.
Video tutorial #1
http://polaris.umuc.edu/de/csi/2012_library_tutorials/tutorial_01/tutorial_01.html
After you have reviewed the tutorial, please complete the following tasks.
1. For the previous exercise, you found four articles on the millennial generation. You may use one of the four articles you found, or you may find a new one. But find an article that provides additional key words or other search terms that you can use to enhance your search. This technique was outlined in the first video.
What additional words did you find that enhanced your search? Please write them here.
2. Use the Boolean operator “OR,” as the video demonstrates, and type in these terms.
Please write the topic on which you searched and the search terms you used to search on it.
