Effective Communication

•Make the best use of your e-mail account. Be as detailed as possible and have effective titles. Use your signature to give the e-mail a professional look. Do not send e-mails indiscriminately, use your judgment. If a subject matter requires a lengthy back and forth, set a call or a meeting instead. E-Mails are best used to summarise discussions, set agendas, request for clarification or to provide updates. Use paragraphs and spell check in your e-mail and do check your sentence structure and grammar using online tools before sending it out. A poorly worded or badly written e-mail can reduce the impact of your message or lead the reader to snap judgments against your intellect. It may also be frustrating for the reader to sort out a messy e-mail to get to the point and this may frustrate the reader, which is never good.

•Verbal cues are useful to gauge how interested your audience is in whatever you are communicating. Pause in between points to throw out a question or a quiz to assess if they are on track. You may also pause to provide a mid-way summary of what you are talking about. Six points back to back will be difficult to absorb especially if some of them are rather similar, or repetitive or extremely complex. This is why it is always imperative that after a verbal discussion, you circle back to your e-mail to send out a point form summary on what was just discussed

•It also helps with verbal communications to not be monotonous. A droning tone with no rhythm or accentuations will contribute to a sense of being overwhelmed. Try accentuating your tone on the keywords. Once again, when you are sending out the e-mail on the points, highlight or underline those keywords in the e-mail for emphasis