Unfortunately for the professor, it’s their job to provide negative feedback on student assignments so this is always a risk for them.

As a result, you may feel dejected and not capable in the class. The professor may harm your relationship with them if they only give you negative feedback, or even no feedback at all. How your professor explains why you got a bad grade will impact your relationship with them. This goes both ways since how your professor responds to your work will also establish, maintain, or harm your relationship with them.įor example, let’s say you receive your first assignment back from a professor and you get a bad grade. The first time you hand-in assignment to a professor, whether its this class or any other, you are developing the relationship you have with your professor. As a technical communicator, we want to try to minimize this as much as possible, even when it’s unavoidable. Harming a relationship: This obviously causes negative repercussions.

Maintaining a relationship: You will make conscious choices about what you say and how you say it to ensure a relationship keeps going into the future.Establishing a relationship: You are connecting with someone for the first time and introducing yourself because you’ve never met before.There are three ways that relation comes into play when we communicate: Ultimately, our connection with an audience should influence how we communicate our ideas. When we think about relation or relationships in communication, we are not thinking in terms of romance, but we are considering the role of connection. “All communication involves an element of relation as well as content” (MacLennan, 2009, p. Regardless of the result of that communication (whether it is positive or negative), an interaction always happens. What matters most is how we communicate those facts and how the audience might receive those facts.

When we communicate, it’s not just the facts that matter. You can still share elements of your personality and show the person on the other end of your communication that you recognize their shared humanity. To be a good technical communicator, you should always try to include a personal connection. Understanding that communication involves interaction really forces us to be conscious of the personal dimension whenever we communicate, and to remember that communication is a complicated, dynamic process, and not a simple transfer of data from one individual to another. We must always think about who is going to be reading our email, letter, or report, who is going to listen to our presentation. 9).Įvery time we communicate there is a personal dimension, a personal impact. “Communication is not simply an exchange of information, but an interaction between people” (MacLennan, 2009, p. After each one, you will have an opportunity to apply your understanding to personal experiences and real world scenarios. We will now go over each of these axioms in detail. Just as importantly, the Axioms tell you what you should not say and what you should avoid when designing and delivering a message. Most importantly, these axioms help you design effective messages, so that you better understand what you should say and how you should say it. Communication is pervasive: you cannot not communicate.Effective communication is audience-centred, not self-centred.Communication is frequently ambiguous: what is unsaid can be as important as what is said.All communication involves an element of interpersonal risk.Communication is the main means through which we exert influence.Communication is the principal way by which we establish ourselves and maintain credibility.Communication takes place within a context of ‘persons, objects, events, and relations’.All communication involves an element of relation as well as content.Communication is not simply an exchange of information, but an interaction between people.

Nine elements of communication