Critical Reflection

            Looking back at the past 13 weeks of this module, Effective Communication, I had gained much confidence in terms of my presentation and English writing skills. I recalled that the first lesson was self-introductory where icebreaking activities were conducted by Professor Brad Blackstone. The activities allowed me to understand the importance of interactional skills that transcends to having better conversations between the other party and myself. At the end of the first class, I had to set goals I hope to achieve during this module. Some of these goals include, becoming a model presenter and developing appropriate writing skills. In the second week, I revisited several grammatical concepts and learnt how to apply it into formal email writing. I understood the importance of the difference in tone and language use with respect to the person receiving the letter. The formality would be dependent on how close I am to the person I am writing to, and this would apply to report writing and presentations too.

            I was then introduced to one of the most interesting segments of this module, the Learning Portfolio. This portfolio is a blog where my peers and I would post our work that we learnt throughout the entirety of this module. The key components that build up the portfolio includes the formal email writing, summary reader response drafts, technical report writing drafts and lastly, critical reflections. This blog was extremely useful as my peers and I exchanged feedbacks on our work through commenting on each other’s blog. Through these comments, I learnt that there are various approaches on how to refine my work. From week 1 to week 13, I achieved plenty with regards to improving on my grammatical concepts, proper refinement of my own work in response to my peer’s comments on room of improvement, and the willingness to be more vocal and participative despite my introverted nature.

            In addition to the module learning, a huge portion of this module revolved around the final project that has two portions, technical report writing and presentation. These portions are a reflection and application of all the skills we learnt throughout the module learning. Some of the key skills include the paraphrasing and citation convention skills I learnt from summary reader response, the presentation skills I grasped from the Monroe’s motivated sequence, and the 7Cs, which ultimately applies to both portions. Also, as the leader of my group, I learnt that to produce quality work, effective communication is required to produce efficiency and good teamwork within the process. I also learnt the importance of managing the flow of the project through having meeting minutes and Gantt charts to ensure that we do not fall behind time.

            The final presentation was very interactive, and I managed to improve my own presentation skills through observing my groupmates flaws. By helping one another, we eliminated several of our flaws through many rehearsing of the presentation before attempting to present a captivating pitch to the rest of the class. In technical report writing, I managed to reflect on one of my flaws in my summary reader response, whereby topic sentences are significantly important to provide the reader with an overview of the paragraph. After numerous drafts of our technical report, I realized that refinement is key to producing the highest quality report.

            To sum up, as a civil engineer to be, I hope that the essential and effective communication skills I developed throughout this module would aid me plenty when interacting with supervisors or construction workers. I also hope to apply the presentational skills I cultivated when presenting my future engineering related work to my superiors when required. With this, I would like to end off by expressing my sincerest gratitude to the man and my professor, Brad Blackstone, who made my learning journey so enjoyable yet turning me into a better individual with effective communication skills.