Final Reflection

Through this course, I had a true feeling about how important effective and professional communication is. I will illustrate this point by two examples of mine.

Before I take this course, I knew nothing about writing meeting agenda. So when I was the president of photography committee in the hall, before I arrange a meeting, I never sent meeting agenda to the members. Therefore, at the beginning of every meeting, I need to employ some time to tell the members the agenda of the meeting orally. In addition, I found it is difficult to ask the members to give some new ideas during the meeting. This might be because it is hard to think of new ideas within a short time. Based on what I learned from this course, however, if I could send meeting agenda to the members beforehand to let them know the contents of the meeting, they might do some preparation and the meeting would go more smoothly and efficiently.

The other example is that before I take the course, I did not know there is a standard format of citing references for a formal documentary material such as research report. Six months ago, I participated in an essay competition, which required the participants to compose a 4000 words essay on a certain topic and send the essay to the organizer. Today I relook at my essay and find that all the citing works at the end of the essay were done in a wrong way. I did not follow to any formal format of reference, such as APA format. This made my essay very unprofessional and I think the judgers of the competition were very likely to deduct marks because of this.

In the future, I believe, these two kinds of situation will never happen. This is because, from the course, I have already developed many effective and professional communication skills, including writing meeting agenda and composing research report. With these skills, I will be able to communicate with others more effectively.