My FOP Experience

For my FOP I was "assigned" to work on students' writing skills. Personally I am facing writing skills problems, by working on the issue, it helped me to identify the important elements that contributed to effective writing skills.  In order to have effective writing the content must be well organized, the purpose must be clear, concise and direct to the point, lastly the tone and grammar. As for me, I need to focus on my grammar.

Any way, I felt that I had tried my best. In Chinese we have one quote "One minute on the stage required ten years of practice" . Even though I did not literally spend ten years to prepare, I had spent days to rehearse. On the day of presentation I had went to school early to rehearse, and i had recorded my own presentation and corrected mistook that i had made.

For the presentation, I was third presenter. As soon as first presenter Qi Long finished his presentation, I felt stressed, as his presentation was good and his slides were nice. On the other hand, I felt that my slides are too simple and most importantly my presentation skills are not as good compare to Qi Long.

When it was my turn, I believed that I had a good start up. However, when I was presenting on my recommendations portion, I had skipped part of my script. I did not realised it until I was repeating the same sentence. Naturally, I tried to recall which part I had skipped but I totally forgot what I had forgot. After the presentation, I recalled what had happen and I felt that I should continued to present on other parts instead of standing there trying to recall my script.    

For the Q and A part, I was able to answer all the questions, the problems were the use of the words and the tenses. When I was nervous I did not "process" the words and the tense, I just spill whatever come into my mind.

Quote from JiaHui (my classmate) "To my classmates, I hope you guys feel good about beating your-GT-selves." .  I am satisfied with my FOP performance, as I had beat my-GT-self.  With adequate practice I will be able surpassing myself everyday.

Group Training (GT)

Hi everyone, this week my post will be about my GT presentation.

I must thank all my team members, they provided valuable feedbacks that helped me improved my presentation.  I really enjoyed working with my team members.

For the GT, during the actual day I was very nervous. My team and I had been using high power poses to “hypnosis “our mind. For others I am not sure was it useful or not, but I felt that it was helpful as I was not as nervous before I used the high power poses.

For presentation I did not really did well. For instance, my presentation and the slides did not synchronize at the conclusions part, I had finished presenting the whole slide, but my slide is still blank, I only realize it when I look back to the screen. My gestures could also be improved, when I was clicking the clicker it was very obvious that I was trying to point it at the slide and it did not look natural on how I clicked it.  Lastly was my language and pronunciation which was weakest in my presentation (I think is the worse in my class).  If I am able to improve on my language and pronunciation, I believe that my presentation will be much better.

As for the slides, the feedback was that the presentation should be focus on presenters instead of slides and slides should be concise. Our slides were too wordy; we should try to make it simple.

In conclusion I believe that there are lots of areas that I can improve on and become a better presenter.

Report: Main Question/Thesis/Outline

Report Writing Scenario Topic D
There have been complains that NUS graduates do not write well when they start work. As such, there is a need to improve the written communication skills of the NUS students before they graduated. However, with written communications skills having such a wide range of topics, NUS is having some difficulty in deciding which aspects they should be focusing to provide the necessary training or courses to address this issue. As such, I have been approached to produce a report to analyse which aspects of written communication should take priority.

PPQ (Problem, Purpose, Questions)

Problem
NUS graduate do not write well when they start work.

Purpose
The purpose of the report is to identify which aspects of the written communication skills NUS students should focus on, and provide recommendations that will help NUS students improve their written communication skills.

Questions
1.Which aspects of written communication skills NUS students are weak at at workplace?
2.What are the weaknesses in current courses?

Report outline 

1. Executive Summary

 This section will be done last as it is a one-page statement of the problem, the purpose of the communication, and a summary of the results, conclusions, and recommendations.” (http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/726/07/) 

 

2. Introduction 
      a. Background
      b. PPQ
      c. Scope
      d. Limitations
      e. Sources and methods

3. Findings
Show all relevant findings in this section. May be can use cause and effect method to display the finding, what cause the current problem and the effect.

4. Conclusions
Evaluate the findings and organise the evaluation according to degree of importance, urgency and relevance.(Not necessary to follow the finding section outline)

5. Recommendations  
Provide recommendations based on the findings and conclusions.
     a. NUS should introduce English modules to all faculties.
     b. Introduce a long term English module. (Languages cannot be build  overnight) 

6. Overall Conclusion
Reintroduce PPQ to refresh readers' memory. Since this is the last section of report, I must highlight the key findings, conclusions and recommendations. Highlight the possible future advantages or improvements if the recommendations are taken seriously. Lastly the report must end in a highly persuasive and urgent note.

7. References  
List of references.

Intercultural Communication

Intercultural communication is unavoidable in today's society, as we are living in an increasingly globalized world.  Most of us will be travelling around the world either for holidays or jobs purposes, it is important for us to have culture awareness. Today I will post a story about a Singapore manager who went to China to compete in a construction project.

Yang was the manager of Z Company, he was sent to China to compete in a construction project which was important to the company. Within one week Yang had prepared an impressive proposal and had done plainly amount of researches about China’s cultures. He was confident that he would get the project.

While Yang was in China he followed the cultures of China. 

As expected, Yang had persuaded the China Company to give Z Company the project. Few days before signing contract, Yang was told that the CEO of China Company likes to collect antiques.  Upon hearing the news Yang quickly bought an antique scissors and wrapped it in red paper. After making sure it was nicely wrapped he sent the gift to the CEO.

However few hours later Yang was told that contract signing ceremony had been canceled. Yang was astonished by the news. He did not know what went wrong.  

Before continue reading make a guess what caused the China Company to cancel the contract?

The mistake he made was that he should not sent scissors as a gift, sending scissors is a signal to the receiver that the sender wants to cut all the relationships and connections between them. Although Yang had done researches about China’s cultures, it is impossible for him to known all the cultures especially the non-verbal communication.

My question is how can Yang avoid such intercultural communication misunderstanding?