TABLE II
Facilitators
Robert Myers, Professor, Dept. of Communication Studies, Baruch College, CUNY
Roy Speed, President, Salient Communication
Discussion Questions
2) How does listening factor into effective communication? What does it mean to listen effectively? How might effective listening be fostered or taught in both academic and business settings?
3) Are correctness and adherence to formal conventions always required for communication to be successful? Do incorrect grammar, punctuation, non-standard pronunciation (as in accents of various sorts), or deviation from formal conventions necessarily lead to miscommunication?
Consider an instance of miscommunication
Examples from the table:
1. A joke that went too far: one person put his photo in the brochure of this conference as a joke to his friends—they circulated it
2. An example from a LIU University professor who didn’t communicate a specific deadline to students
3. Managing tone in email/writing with students
Robert Myers: (Baruch) It seems that email is leading to more problems
Roy Speed (Salient Communication): If you compare email to old memos—certain problems didn’t happen. Email can be considered “a medium for improvisation.” The mental approach to email is similar to the mental approach to voicemail. There is no pre-thought and therefore more misfires than in memo days. There is a lack of writing process towards the end product.
Catherine Black (LIU): Don’t forget the overburdening stemming from the popularity of email.
The feeling of being “compelled” to email and now the iPhone. This need to be “in touch.”
Diana Richter (NYU) It is the famous “medium is the message” syndrome. Reading of administrative emails is a challenge and a source of tensions. For example, students are uninterested in reading/learning about the state of the university. But it is also true that any discussion of a tuition raise will be buried in an email.
Myers: This has really been a change at Baruch, the lack of hard-copies and grouping information all into one long email. What is the difference in terms of comprehension? Do people print it out? The paperless office never happened.
How is miscommunication related to problems of channel?
Example: A manager tells his department, “we need to meet on Fri. at 3pm.” All week, the staffers think something terrible has happened. At the meeting, a change in the dental plan is announced. This is a misuse of a face-to-face meeting. An inverse example: people being fired over a fax
Notion of channel: when do you choose email, hard copies, face-to-face?
Louise Klusek (Baruch Library): How often do you get an email and answer by phone? Or when do you need to stop an email conversation? When do you change the channel?
Robert Myers: In the old days, you’d take an important memo and put it in your desk overnight to think about it.
Cathy Black: Our litigious society forces everyone to be putting things down on paper so quickly, almost immediately.
Louise Klusek: That’s what’s happening in libraries. The modes of communication are changing. A Chat reference, this is in real-time, students chat with librarians but there is a lack of interest in going to the library. The burden is now on the librarian to engage them, to make them feel comfortable. Librarians must now learn how to establish relationships at the reference desk.
Roy Speed: Routine interactions are now pushed into a writing medium in corporations. Even in fundamental report writing is now being utilized. Writing is an unforgiving medium it represents a kind of wager. So when certain communications are pushed into a writing medium it becomes complex. There is an effort to try to approximate give-and-take of conversation. People are so busy: they have trouble conceiving of meeting in real-time even email is used as a virtual conference room. It can become a real problem: when the communication starts addressing sensitive issues in an email. There should be more committing to paper the issues that would/should be discussed in a conference room
Wendy Williams (BLSCI): Email becomes default for anything that is not an angry crisis
Challenge for teaching:
Diana Richter: The struggle of giving feedback to students regarding career, counseling – pushing them to go to the office, to call, etc. The attraction to the academic environment originally was for its “community,” but now we are seeing a decentralized aspect of higher education. Is this a generational shift, or about the culture of the place?
Robert Myers: Now we have the trend for “phone interviews” for jobs. Baruch is a diverse campus, the mix of students– I often need to remind myself about reference and context. Am I using examples that make sense? There is a major question of students not getting practice with intercultural communication. They can often exhibit impatience with each other.
Klusek: The issue of students not seeing applicability of citing sources when it comes to job experiences. IBank- a collection of “best practices” documents: citing sources even there. And update numbers: but where’d the numbers come from? The organization needs to understand it: the bankers can then say: “has the National Bankers Association updated this data”?
Speed: What corporations don’t see in consumers of their corporate writing is how effort adverse their readers are. In other words: if you want to get read, if you need to get read, it better be “a piece of cake to read.” People will say, “my manager says, I need this into bullets.” But what your manager wants is a good job, but when he/she wants it down to one page, they actually express a cynicism on the consumer of the writing. Can this at least be a short bear to read, rather than a long bear to read?
Myers: It is the classic distinction between brevity and conciseness.
Sherman Ferguson (Technical Writer, Eaton Corporation): yet there has to be lengthy documentation about how to prepare equipment, or other important information. Our technicians need to be really clear on what they’re reading. I say try to reduce the verbiage, increase the graphics.
Klusek: The SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) is going that way, too. But are we compounding the problem just using more graphs? Are we then overestimating visual literacy?
Relationship between Audience of readers and writing:
Speed: The issue is of readers “skipping around.” We misread this about our readers: they are in the midst of a long-term change. The reader in 1911 was accustomed to tyranny in the reading experience, a strict linear sequence. Now, we don’t have that, but we’re still writing as though we did. Readers are used to reading it their way. Ex: flipping through magazines.
Klusek: This applys to eBooks, as well the demand is for the ability to search books, highlight, scroll, etc. Students who are technophobes vs. those who want it at home, on desktop, etc.
Speed: Yes an increasing proportion of everyone’s reading now takes place online: leaping from thing to thing, only lighting on what is of interest to you. The tyranny of the writer is dead, but the business world writes like it is not.
Key to high impact writing:
1. Logical organization
2. Headline
3. Enable people to zero in, to choose
Speed: The future is skipping. How can we write in a way that makes skipping work? How can we flag the things they can’t afford to miss? (and read them our way?)
Richter: There is a tension when in resume writing, how to sustain a narrative? What adds value? Business communication: how do we instill a narrative? How do we teach them in academia to build an argument.
Williams: We are discussing multiple things here—Twitter vs. Novel-reading vs….
Speed: in the corporate world, people are asked by their companies to write by committee. The entire academic experience is a solo act. People are helpless when writing by committee, they try to turn it into solo writing. The problem is that only one out of an entire committee will have collaboration tools. The tools need to be shared.
Klusek: I tried using collaborative tools, even my colleagues resist.
Speed: There is a dysfunction around delegating writing. Delegating can be a mind-reading exercise – usually managers don’t make it clear enough to the subordinates. And increasingly, the subordinate begins loathing the manager. It is all a time-wasting exercise. The bigger issue is between manager & subordinate, within a committee there is a lack of shared language of talking about language, or the narrative, or the arc, or what the flow of the argument will be. A common situation is a point person will not be subject matter expert. So how can you create the tools to have these conversations?
Wendy: I have seen a total lack of consistency in student collaborations. It often reflects how professor is structuring the assignment.
Speed: I try to solve this problem by giving them a process: decide who is the target audience? After the audience digests the material, what happens? Define very quickly what the desired responses are in the target audience. You need a room equipped to do this kind of writing. it is the real work of writing: before the wordsmithing: sentencing, sequencing Can you all see it? Is everyone feeling free to contribute to it? (Challenge of the wipeboard: can you take it away?) Information-mapping tools, word-mapping tools
Hillary (BLSCI): it’s related to trying to encourage the ‘messiness’ of the writing process we’ve been discussing on the institute blog.
Williams: what writing collaboration tool do you recommend?
Speed: get away from technology, anything that requires you to write a full sentence, get away from the wordsmithing task. Do something that allows you as much contact with audience and content. For example: employees in a health plan need to educate members about health plan fraud. “Put your pens down, don’t think about anything. Think about the members. Become members. Think about the first thing that comes to mind when I say ‘pharmacy fraud.’” Everything that came to mind: scribbled on board: constructed main points. With any given audience there are enormous reserves of knowledge and understanding. This needs to be starting point: summon up reality of the audience’s point of view. It’s not a wordsmithing challenge: that’s a recipe for writer’s block
Ideas for the challenge:
That writers underestimate effort adverse readers.
Speed: when working with people who write company newsletters: physically, where is the customer when they read their newsletter? Usually standing over a trash can
we’ve all become incredibly discerning: from direct mail, to email inbox, etc. scrutinizing subject line, envelope, etc.
Williams: This applies to online reading as well: looking for what applies to you.
Speed: The need for high-quality thinking before writing. Sometimes is adverse to pure thinking. Students and employees, experience is the feeling that they need to be forced to think. Somehow, they’ve learned wordsmithing is less painful. It avoids difficult decisions, the real nature of challenge. Wordsmithing vs. strategy/tactical challenges.
Williams: I would apply this to the challenge of dissertation writing The right questions? Importance of brainstorming? Writer’s block?
Black: Or the challenge of too much information/material
Myers: can we further define it?
Speed: The first question is: what are they trying to achieve? Kissinger said “if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there” The minute you have a goal, whatever you produce is not okay. Purpose vs. outcomes, funny enough but they are not always the same.
Black: When I work with business/management students: I say “Go SWOT yourselves,” Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities Threats.
Myers/Speed:
There is a question of the nature of delegation: You need to delegate writing, you need to also set standards, and create a disciplined process. It always begins with talking about outcomes: minimal conversations before delegating. And or effective delegating of writing challenges: managing writing. Any management training school in the country is missing a discussion of managing writing, yet it’s eating up a bigger & bigger part of the employee’s day. Every new writing medium of communication is thrown into our laps with no standards.
Speed: It is a challenge to come to grips with out readers. How do we focus on miscommunication in the sense of communication that is sent out but goes no where with the intended audience (ignored, misunderstood).
Jazzed about:
- Looking at the challenge of listening in context of effective writing
- Paying attention to audience
- Reader’s wanting things their way
