Critical Reflection

Dear Professor Blackstone,

I think it is time to bid my last farewell as we are approaching the end of the module and a new year. It has been a fruitful and productive trimester for me as I have picked up on many skills for effective communication. Before the start of this module, I struggled a lot in public speeches as I was never confident with the way I present myself and my ideas. As mentioned in my first formal letter, I wanted to overcome my fear of speaking to large crowds and sure enough, I did.

Through this module, I managed to build up my self-confidence and improve on expressing my thoughts in words. To show my appreciation for this fruitful journey, I would like to share a few takeaways and learning points that I had from the module.

As you have mentioned before, one of the ways to do well in a presentation is to enjoy the process of presenting. There are no rules to follow as everyone presents in their own unique ways. As for me, I enjoyed the process of researching for my project and was eager to share my findings. With the excitement I had, I was able to speak in a friendlier tone and lower the tension between the audience and myself. This has helped me to overcome my anxiety and I was able to pace my speech very well.

Another takeaway that I am proud of is the ability to craft out formal emails. Through your lessons, you gave us opportunities to spot out mistakes from sample emails and emphasize the use of the '7Cs of Communication' in every letter that we write. After that lesson, I always keep this skillset in the back of my head whenever I need to write an email. Especially during my project, I had to write to several professors for interviews and I believe that most of them replied based on how 'professional' the email is. With this knowledge, I have received replies to my emails and I am now able to craft out informative and formal emails.

Upon completion of the project, the most memorable moment for me would be the sharing of feedback from my peers and myself. I am thankful that my peers have given us constructive feedback to improve our technical report writing. They even gave suggestions on how we could improve and provided additional articles that we could use to support our findings. As my peers viewed our report from a different perspective, the degree of how well they understand the report is important to us. As I have to write more reports in the future, for both my career and studies, the skills that I learned like summarizing articles accurately and citing them in accordance with APA standards will be of good use.

As I publish this last blog post, I would like to sincerely thank you for your unconditional efforts to help us in our writing and effective communication skills. It has been a meaningful module for me, and I hope to see you around soon.

Best regards,

Junying