By J.D. Eddy, Editorial Editor
Effective communication is one of the most important aspects of everyday life. When there are communication breakdowns, things tend to go from bad to worse. But there are ways to prevent these breakdowns, whether they’re in higher education, sports, work or everyday life.
Positive communication means that your team is on the same page. Everyone understands what’s going on. Better communication leads to better trust, relationship building, engagement in the topic, increased job satisfaction, creativity and increased efficiency for you and your colleagues. These are all good things that come out of effective communication.
There are negative effects from not communicating in a good way. We will talk about them in a minute, but for now, the main thing is the positive side. I am a student athlete, so communication is one of the most important things. We must have clarity about our strategies.
In an academic setting, we need to be able to write at a high level for ourselves and our professors. Up until the 1960s, things like specialization in writing fields were not considered to be a major subject or worth the time. Instead of stimulating creativity and allowing new ideas to flourish, most written papers were graded based on mechanical means: grammar, punctuation and sentence structure.
Over time, people began to grade papers based on content. Once this happened, new ideas became the forefront of writing in higher education, but rough drafts become a newer concept.
Submitting the paper beforehand to have a guiding hand in fixing basic mistakes in your work became known as good practice. Instead of stifling new ideas and creativity in writing, students were able to put forth new ideas.
If you go back and look at older works, there seems to be a change in the atmosphere in writing. Basically, people found a sense of excitement about being able to put forth these new concepts on paper.
When I talk about writing, putting my work on paper in the literal sense for the newspaper is important.
This is something open to all students. If you want to read your opinion in the paper to communicate your ideas and opinions, you are more than welcome to write a letter to Northwestern News. The team and I would really like to hear it.
Ride, Rangers, Ride!