Skills for Higher Education: Identifying Strengths and Weaknesses in Group Communication

This report identifies the strengths and weaknesses of group communication skills in higher education. It discusses different types of communication, including language, paragraph structuring, email writing, report structure, and instructional documents for staff. Recommendations for improvement are provided.

Identifies the strengths and
weaknesses in your group's
communication skills

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Communication refers to one of the major skill and medium that is related with the delivery
of message and sharing of information. The main aim of this report is to identify the strength and
weakness of the group's communication skills. It will shed light on the effectiveness of the
communication in the academic as well as organisational area. The concerned project would
have an inculcation of various journals, articles and books in the context of communication and
its association with regard to the group. In the same way this report will also shows that how
communication act as advantages and disadvantages among the group. Different types of
communication and their importance will be the major focus of the report. In the same way with
the report will also draw a main description that how with the mode of effective communication
the group work and activity would be adequately executed.

Table of Contents
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY.............................................................................................................2
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................4
FINDINGS.......................................................................................................................................5
Identification of strength and weakness of the group..................................................................5
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................7
RECOMMENDATIONS.................................................................................................................8
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................1

INTRODUCTION
Communication refers to the medium, of transferring the information from one person to
another. It plays an importation role in the day to day activities of a person. The effective
communication is necessary in the professional field. It leads to the decrease in the barriers in the
organisation. The role of communication is vital in both organization and academic area that help
to ensure that the work is done in the most effective manner. This report will discuss about the
Several strength and weakness in the communication identified of the group. The purpose of the
report to discuss the current position of the group in the field of communication skills. Different
types of communication will be included in the report such as formality, language, paragraph
structuring, email writing, structure of report and instructional documents for staff. This report
will also give recommendation in order to improve the communication skills of the group with
the help of effective training methods.

FINDINGS
Identification of strength and weakness of the group
Strength of the group in the field of communication is the use of specific language. It
refers to the use of an appropriate language that helps the listener or reader to understand better.
According to The Douglas Fir Group (DFG, 2017) language is an emergent, social, integrated
phenomena. Language plays an essential role in day to day lives. Use of effective language is the
major element of the communication (Bailey, 2017). Example 1: The use of language such as a
leader of team A told to the team that “this mistake will not be repeated” and the leader of team
B say the same in different tone as “ we will do it better next time” there is a difference in both
saying as the saying of leader A spread the negativity and demotivate the team members as the
language appears like Leader is authoritarian. On the second side saying of leader B motivates
the employees and encourage them to be better (al., 2020). Such type of communication strength
can be seen in group.
Paragraph Structure is another strength of group's communication skills. Cedeño Gómez
and Kerly Carolina (2018) has been stated that it is necessary to elaborate the paragraph correctly
by following the correct structure, it helps in keeping the writing consistent and improve the
learning to determine the information at the time of analysis. Example 2: as the second example
indicates that the first line of the paragraph include “ the main aim of this report is to identify the
strength and weakness of the group” it helps the reader to understand the majority of the
paragraph and reader will also understand that what is going to be discussed in the information of
the main body.
Communication strength of the group can be identified as Report Structures. According
to Rapp and Kauf (2018) the structure of the report should include title, table of content,
introduction, main body, recommendation, conclusion and references as there are the essential
part of the academic or formal writing. Example 3: The use of proper Heading along with the
introduction and conclusion helps the reader to understand the information easily. It allows them
to jump on the topic that a reader wants to get information on a particular topic. Use of table of
contain makes it easy for the reader to find the specific information from the writing. This
strength of the group is very helpful for the reader to get the information easily.
The major weakness of the group in the field of communication is the Use of Formality.
Argüello (2020) stated that formality in the communication is the most appropriate way in the

professional field but the use of semi formal is the most effective communication method in the
organisation that is used by the leaders to motivate the employees. Example 4. Use of more
formal language such as “henceforth”, “subsequently” may confuse the reader to understand
completely or the emotions are hardly to express wit the help of too formal language in the
communication. Instead of such works the use of “from now on” “hence” or “later” helps the
reader to understand the emotion better and it leads to the greater impression on the reader.
Formal language may disrupt the interest of the reader or listener (Canterbury Christ Church
University, 2021). The most effective way of communication is the semi formal as it does not
include informal works that may look offensive or it also does not include too formal language
may confuse the reader.
Email Writing is the another weakness of the group's communication skills. It refers to
the use of electronic mail system to transfer the information. The main purpose of the email
should be clear in the first full sentence (Smith, 2020). Example 5: the use of this communication
has not been adopted by the group. Effective contain and subject of the email saves the time of
the reader such as the subject says “please consider the amount in the report of 2021”. the reader
will directly understand what is the information is about and what is to be done. It will directly
indicate the reader to work on the report of 2021. This ability of the effective email content and
subject has not been developed by the group. The matter in the e-mail should not consider
another thing outside the subject as it may lead to the misinformation to the reader. “Please
consider the amount in financial report of 2021” can be considered as more effective as it shows
what exactly is to be done.
The final weakness of group's communication skills include Instructional documents for
staff. It refers to the document that contains all the necessary information related to the vision
and objective of the organisation that provides guide to each job position in order achieve the
goal of organisation (Sengupta, 2019). Example 6. The use of appropriate headings and content
plays an important role in the organisation. In order to instruct the employees about the leave on
a particular day the organisation must include all the information “ there will be leave on the 5th
of November for the department” it might confuse the employees as the year is not mentioned in
the information and employees may get confuse in the department. An appropriate information
should include “there will leave on the 5th of November, Thursday for the financial department of
the X organisation ”. The group is weak in this part of the communication skill.

CONCLUSION
From the discussion in the report, it can be concluded that the group showed several
strength and weakness in the communication skills. Different types of communications were
discussed in order to measure the current situation of the group. Different types of
communication skills include formality, language, paragraph structuring, email writing, structure
of report and instructional documents for staff. From the analysis of the current situation of the
group, it has been concluded that the there is a need of some improvement in the group.
Weakness of the group included Email Writing, Instructional documents for staff and Formality.
With the communication playing such a vita role in the discussion. It could help in both morale
and operations within these environment.

RECOMMENDATIONS
1. It can be recommended that training exercise for staff on email-writing best-practice. The
training of the employees with appropriate and effective methods such as using the semi
formal language in the email. This training session in the organisation should provide
effective guidance on the factors that include formality and increase the skills in email
writing.
2. It can be recommended creating a list of examples of appropriate language used to train
new or existing staff members. The use of language in the communication must be
developed wit the help of training session that helps the employees the practise in
communication with appropriate language that is formal, simple and appropriate.
3. It can be recommended developing a ‘style guide’ that features examples of well-
structured paragraphs to be used as a future benchmark. The guide of the sample
document should be provided to the people that contains the accurate structure of the
report and paragraphs. The use of sample document by the employees in writing
information will lead to the learning of reporting and paragraph structure. The sample
document of the paragraph should be used by the employees in the organisation on a
daily basis in order to increase the efficiency in the communication skills of the group.
4. It can be recommended sample of poorly focused emails be re-written to demonstrate
how more focus can be applied in the writing of an effective email. Such practise in the
training session of the organisation lead to the development in the communication skills
of the employees.

REFERENCES
Books and journals
al., S. e., 2020. Nonverbal Communication and Body Language. [Online] Available at:
https://www.helpguide.org/articles/relationships-communication/nonverbal-
communication.htm#
Argüello, G., 2020. Regime Interaction and GAIRS. In Maritime Law in Motion (pp. 15-37).
Springer, Cham.
Bailey, S., 2017. Academic Writing: A Handbook for International Students. 5th ed.
s.l.:Routledge
Canterbury Christ Church University, 2021. Signposting Words. [Online] Available at:
https://www.canterbury.ac.uk/students/docs/study-skills/resource-8-Signposting-
Words.pdf
Cedeño Gómez, K.C. and Villegas Liriano, Y.I., 2018. Incidence of narrative texts paragraph
structure in the written production (Bachelor's thesis, Universidad de Guayaquil
Facultad de Filosofía, Letras y Ciencias de la Educación).
Rapp, C. and Kauf, P., 2018. Scaling academic writing instruction: Evaluation of a scaffolding
tool (Thesis Writer). International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education, 28(4),
pp.590-615.s
Smith, N.A., 2020, November. Writing strategies for science communication: Data and
computational analysis. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in
Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) (pp. 5327-5344).
Online
The mordern Journal, 2019. [Online]. Available through
<https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/modl.12532>
Sengupta, D., 2019. Why design Documents are Vital For creating Elearning Cources. [Online].
Available through <https://elearningindustry.com/design-documents-for-elearning-
courses-vital-creating>
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