Critical reflection

Dear Professor Brad

How time flies, in the blink of an eye, we are approaching the end of the trimester. At the start of this module, I gave myself the main goal of improving my technical writing skills. I aimed to work on my summary skills and also be able to sustain longer professional conversations. Proud to say, I have made some improvements. 

In the beginning, I always fail to address the main idea of a given article in my summary. I tend to over summarise my key contents. With the amount of guidance and tips throughout the weeks, I have successfully learnt the ropes. I was exposed to the pyramid principle which effectively breaks down the flow of writing into the main focus, the secondary theses, and supporting data to each thesis. This writing structure enlightened me. Along the many gruesome weeks, we have formed many different workgroups during lessons for various purposes. Due to that reason, I managed to establish good relationships with my peers. For my technical report group, I took up the role of the speaker since I mentioned my aim to work on my communications skills on a professional level. This role allowed me to practice my articulation and slowly build up confidence in front of a bigger crowd. Aside from the regular pitching on project idea, I believe that more activities that help establish interpersonal communication is required as well. I feel that through more interactions with my peers, and not just projects, I would be able to enhance my social skills and present myself better as an individual.

Regarding my research project, the most memorable area has to be the transition of drafting my pitch into effectively presenting it to the live audience. The drafting of pitch was entirely done behind the scenes at our individual level. Through this tedious process, I have learnt to craft my speech in a way that can captivate someone’s attention. For example, we are recommended to start our pitch with a rhetorical question. In my opinion, a good speaker will need to have a charisma and a good tone to continue keeping the audience’s attention.

Having pitched my team’s idea, I came to realise my tendency of using filler words. For example, instead of properly transiting my sentences, I tend to fill it with words like “so” and “erm”. These are little bad habits that I have cultivated over the years which I probably would have overlooked, if not for the feedbacks that you and the rest of my peers have given. I find these feedback sessions the most useful throughout our journey in this module together. I was tasked like everyone else, to listen and evaluate my peers based on their pitches. From there, I managed to identify the common mistakes or hiccups that others tend to commit, likewise, pick up the commendable efforts from them. Coming into this module, was my first time I was expected to walk around the class during my pitch. I secretly rehearsed that at home prior to my actual pitch which really helped me visualise the scenario (not so secretive anymore).

From the pitch, I noticed some of my peers with excellent body languages and they possess their own unique style of pitching. I hope to one day unravel my own unique style of pitching so that I can build the charisma that I believe makes a good speaker.

Thank you for the unconditional guidance throughout our 13 weeks together. 

Best regards

Rue

Effective communication (T3)