"Business Correspondence Critique"

Name: DHINESH S/O CHANDRA SEGARAN ,MR
Amount Payable: $

This is to inform you that our record shows that you have an outstanding charge in your library account. The amount outstanding is indicated above in : AMOUNT PAYABLE.


You may wish to make your payment in the following ways:

1. By Cashcard / EZ Link . You can pay using cashcard/EZ Link at all libraries in NUS.
2. Through NETS at Central Library. Please see the library staff at Loans Desk 4.
3. By cash at the Student Service Centre at Yusof Ishak House.

4. By cheque. Please make the cheque payable to :National University of Singapore. Please write your Name and staff / student number on the reverse side of the cheque. Please send cheque to : Coordinator, Loans and Membership Services , Central Library, National University of Singapore, 12 Kent Ridge Crescent, Singapore 119275. Please note that fines will be cleared from your record only when the cheque has been cleared by the bank. This will take about one to two days.


If you need further assistance, please do not hesitate to call us at telephone number 6872 0236.

Regards

I received the above e-mail a couple of weeks ago with respect to the outstanding fine in my library account. This fine was to be paid to the Loans & Membership desk at the Central Library.
The mail is pretty straight-forward. The tone used is somewhat formal.

It gets quite straight-to-the-point with my name and the amount I have to pay indicated at the very beginning. (I removed the exact amount payable, as I deemed the amount of cash I had to part with owing to my forgetfulness irrelevant in this case). Anyway, I thought the tone, though formal, could have shown a hint of casualness with a "Dear Mr ...". Given that this was my first such "offence" of this nature, I guess a more casual tone could have been in order. Furthermore, given the fact that this was not a system generated mail or anything, I sensed a certain 'human element' was missing.

Another important point which I realized was that as clear and concise as the mail was, it was not complete. The effort taken to list out the various modes of payment could have also been used to list the titles of the books which I would have to pay the respective overdue fine amounts for. This would have made it easier for me to recollect the reason or reasons why I was paying this fine in the first place.

However, it must be noted that the person does make an attempt at being helpful and polite with the last sentence offering assistance. Oh well, I guess better late than never!

"Resolving Interpersonal Conflict"

Another interesting topic. Well I have had quite a number of interpersonal conflicts in my life. Some I managed to resolve while others I did not. At this time, I am reminded of an incident in which I was subjected to quite a bit of mental and emotional stress. This was during a period of time rather than a specific incident.

This happened in the year 2007 while I was in my second year of study in NUS. I have always been quite actively involved in the Arts despite being a Science student. This is due to the passion which I have had from young, for the Arts. I was actively involved in both the English and Tamil Drama & Debate Societies during my secondary and junior college days. As such, I continue to be heavily involved in such activities while I am pursuing my degree as well. This being the case, I gave my word to a very good friend that I would help co-direct a play with her which had been a dream of hers for years. I gave her my word in 2006 and we decided to start our production work sometime at the beginning of 2007. A couple of months later, towards the end of 2006, another friend whom I was pretty close to at that time approached me to help him co-produce a huge-scale musical for the Tamil Language Society (TLS) of NUS. This musical was the pride & joy of the TLS and I was indeed honoured that I was being asked to co-produce it. Due to this, I agreed to do it despite knowing that it was going to take a miracle for me to be able to manage both the play and the musical.

As expected, when production work proper for both productions began in 2007, I started to panic. I was a nervous wreck, trying to balance lectures and tutorials with all the artistic and logistic work which had to be done for both productions. There were a countless number of occasions in which both friends would say that I was not dedicating enough time to each of their specific productions. Soon, a number of artistes as well as members of the production crew from either side joined in and began accusing me of favouring 'the other production' more. At this point, however, I must mention that the friend I was co-directing the play with did stand up for me quite a bit during those times although she got frustrated with the situation at times.

Finally, both productions were successfully staged. Both received mixed reviews (as all productions do), but I was not fully satisfied with either one. One could say that I bit of more than I could chew. However, I did inform both friends that I was involved in the other production and despite that they were pretty adamant that I be involved in each of their respective productions as well. Now, the question is, whether I should have picked a production of the two to be involved in at the risk of straining my friendship with the other person or should I not have been involved in either? Or is there a third solution I'm totally missing out on?

"Effective Communication Skills"

This is indeed an appropriate topic to start the series of blogs for this module. This is not only so because of the title of this module which is after all "Professional Communication", but also because it is of utmost importance that each student who is doing this module is allowed to express his or her own subjective views on what 'effective communication skills' truly are and what they mean to him or her not only in a working environment but also in their everyday lives as after all effective communication skills transcend the workplace and can help us in our everyday lives in areas such as with the people we meet on a day-to-day basis and the kinds of relationships we forge with them.

As I mentioned before, effective communication skills are truly subjective as what one may consider an effective skill to utilize in communicating with others, another may not. For example, one may consider hand gestures to be an effective aid when speaking to a crowd or when giving a presentation to a group, while another may just dismiss them as being distracting and hence detrimental to the speech or presentation. I for one, stand by a few habits which I have developed over the years which I tend to use more often than not when I'm speaking or presenting. These include eye contact, using a range of different tones and so on...

These habits which I have developed, in themselves show the level of importance at which I have placed the development of effective communication skills. This high level of importance cannot be emphasized enough as although the reason or reasons for developing these skills can vary from person to person, the importance is rarely questioned. When one communicates, one is either trying to put a message across, receive a message or both. In this sense, if one does not know how to effectively convey or receive information, the whole point of communicating in the first place is compromised. In conclusion, personally, I feel that it is better not to communicate at all rather than to communicate ineffectively without the desired effect taking place which would be the registering of the given or received message.