пятница, 21 марта 2014 г.

1.1.2 The Benefits of Human Communication

A perfectly legitimate question to ask before beginning your study of any subject is “why?” Why should I learn about human communication? What will it do for me? What will I be able to do after taking this course that I wasn’t able to do before? In short, how will I benefit from the study of human communication presented in this course and in this text? Actually, you’ll benefit in lots of ways. Your knowledge of human communication and your mastery of many of its skills will enable you to improve a variety of skills that will prove vital to your success and that are covered throughout this text. Here are some of the skills you’ll acquire or improve as you study human communication to give you some idea of how important this study of human communication is: critical and creative thinking skills, interaction skills, relationship skills, leadership skills, presentation skills, and media literacy skills.

■ Critical and creative thinking skills, emphasized throughout this book, help you approach new situations mindfully—with full conscious awareness, increase your ability to distinguish between a sound and valid argument and one that is filled with logical fallacies, and improve your ability to use language to reflect reality more accurately.

■ Interaction skills help you improve your communication in a wide range of forms, from the seemingly simple small talk to the employment interview for the job of a lifetime. Interaction skills will enable you to communicate with greater ease, comfort, and effectiveness whether you’re proposing a life-long relationship or apologizing for some transgression.

■ Relationship skills enable you to build friendships, enter into love relationships, work with colleagues, and interact with family members. These are the interpersonal and relationship skills for initiating, maintaining, repairing, and sometimes dissolving relationships of all kinds. And unless you’re going to be living totally alone, these are skills you’ll use every day, in every encounter. These are the skills that businesses of all kinds have on their lists of most important competencies for organizational success; they are an essential part of business competence (Bassellier & Benbasat, 2004).

■ Leadership skills enable you to communicate information effectively in small groups or with large audiences, and your ability to influence others in these same situations are among your most important leadership skills. In a workplace world that operates largely on group interaction, these skills are increasingly essential if you are to be an effective organizational member and will help you rise in the organization. After all, people in power will often come to know you best through your communications. As you rise in the hierarchy, you’ll need leadership skills to enable you to lead groups and teams in informative, problem-solving, and brainstorming sessions.

■ Presentation skills enable you to present yourself as a confident, likable, approachable, and credible person. Your effectiveness in just about any endeavor depends heavily on your self-presentation—your ability to present yourself in a positive light, through your verbal and nonverbal messages. Incidentally, it is also largely through your skills of self-presentation (or lack of them) that you display negative qualities as well.

■ Media literacy skills will help you interact with both mass and social media more effectively. These skills will help you understand how the media operate, how you can interact more effectively with the media, and how you can be a more effective media creator.

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