In my PDR I mentioned that whilst at university I have witnessed both effective and communication but after having my one-to-one meeting with my supervisor, I realised that it would be useful to blog what I believe to be ineffective and effective communication and how I measure it. This may be useful at the end of the semester when I come to evaluate my development as I can see whether my opinion is the same or has changed after the research I will be conducting.
For me, effective communication is very clear, concise and confidently put across. If in a lecture, the lecturer puts across information in a simple and understandable way, this is more effective than if they were to use flowery language or way too much information. Sometimes when people are trying to overload somebody with information they may lose their track of thoughts and this causes their communication to deteriorate.
If someone is clearly not confident in themselves as a communicator that can, in my opinion, severely affect their communication and its effectiveness. It’s like how people say fake it until you make it and the idea that if you sound confident people will be more likely to believe what it is you are saying. These are some things I believe make for effective verbal communication but communication goes two ways and to be an effective communicator, you must be an active listener.
Overall, I see people who can confidently communicate to a large group as effective communicators, especially if the audience feel as though they have benefitted from their communication. Communication is about informing, discussing and connecting and if communication is effective, all parties come away feeling that they perhaps learned something, feel positive about the transmission. I will come back to this blog at the end of the semester to see whether my opinion has changed, expanded etc.