Sunday PM Workshop: Polishing Your Communication Skills

This workshop will help professionals and students polish their skill. Educators, who teach communication courses, will also find this workshop helpful. For written and oral communication, audience analysis seems to pose the greatest challenge. Suggestions and workshop activities are given to help improve audience analysis. Hints and practice are presented for creating communications to inform versus ones to persuade. Five criteria are given for assessing written and oral reports: audience, content, organization, style and form. Participants get a chance to apply these. The principles of how to give and receive feedback are outlined. Research evidence about the process of writing is summarized. We explore how this can help us. For oral presentations, key ideas about attitude and do’s and don’t are given. Example practice opportunities are provided. If time permits the workshop will include the principles and practice for listening and responding and for assertiveness. This is a workshop. No papers are accepted for this session. Don Woods taught Report Writing at the University of Wisconsin and gave in-house courses while he worked for Distiller’s Co. Ltd and for British Geon. At McMaster University he created the sophomore course on communication in 1964 and taught the course for over 20 years. He created other courses when he was Director of the Engineering and Management program at McMaster.