Critical Reflection

Hello, my name is Claire Chia, I am writing this blog to summarise and reflect on my experience for the past 13 weeks for my Effective Communication(MEC1281) module.

My goal at the start of this course was to improve my presentation skills and writing skills. I am glad to say that I managed to improve my presentation skills by a great deal. This was only possible, as I was my team's project speaker, thus I had a lot of chances to present my team ideas and update my team’s progress to my classmates every week and therefore could work on my presentation skills. To improve my presentation skills, I watched videos on assertion-evidence talk, so that I can learn more on how to present my ideas in a better way. During the final presentation, I thought that I pulled it off well, as for all my past presentations, I would always stutter and fidget a lot but this time I was able to stand firmly and present my ideas smoothly. My writing skills have also improved but the improvement is minimal compared to my presentation skills.   I can also watch more ted talks and learn different presentation skills from the different presenters so that I would be able to gain more presentation skills which would help me improve my communication skills. To improve my writing skills, I learned to use the 7C’s (conciseness, clarity, cohesion, completeness, clarity, concrete, and correctness) when I am writing and I started to read more news articles and reports to improve my language use. To further improve on my presentation skills, I will start to practice more before any presentations so that during the presentation I would not be so nervous and be more confident as practice makes perfect.

As I was doing the final report for my team’s project, LimKopi, I learned a lot of new aspects about myself. I realized that I am a person that likes to take the lead because I would always initiate to the team when we should do the report, assign tasks for my teammates, and decide the time that should we finish our task. I also realized that my writing skills are not as bad as I thought they would be. Additionally, while I was doing the final report, I learned a lot about my teammate's personalities and working styles and that having good teamwork with my teammates is really very important. As we all have very different working styles and personalities, this led to some challenges faced by my team such as being unable to choose an idea at the start of the project because everyone had different opinions on which direction should we take for the project, as we could not adapt to each other at the start of this project. However, we learned to compromise with one another and work in cohesion with each other as we all wanted the project to progress smoothly without any hiccups. From this project, I learned and understand that teamwork skill is an essential skill that everyone should learn. If there were no teamwork between my teammates and me, our project would have been full of hiccups. This project has made me learned how to be a better team player. In addition, this project has also made me learned a lot about report writing such as always write in a third-person view and how to use in-text and end text citation. 

Best Regards,

Claire Chia

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