BcAP Test

Audience-centered approach (pg. 9)

Understanding, respecting, and meeting the needs of your audience members. Getting your message across in a meaningful way to your audience - "You" attitude - Emotional Intelligence - Etiquette

Defining your purpose

to inform, to persuade, or to collaborate with the audience. State your specific purpose as precisely as possible

Low Context Culture

(Such as in the United States) people rely more on verbal communication and less on circumstances and cues to convey meaning. Rules and expectations are usually spelled out through explicit statements. Primary task is exchanging information

Access and legitimacy paradigm

- Access and celebration of differences - Tend to emphasize the role of cultural differences in a company without really analyzing those differences to see how they actually affect the work that is done - access-and-legitimacy paradigm can leave some employees feeling exploited. Many organizations using this paradigm have diversified only in those areas in which they interact with particular niche-market segments

Five characteristics of effective report content

- Accurate: double-check your facts and references in addition to checking to typos - Complete: include all the necessary information - Balanced: omitting relevant information or facts can bias your report - Clear and logical: help your readers move from one point to the next. a successful report identifies the ideas that belong together and organize them in a way that's easy to understand - Documented properly: properly document and give credit to your sources

Elements of an effective presentation opening/introduction

- Arousing audience interest: unite the audience around a common goal, tell a story, pass around product samples or other objects, ask a question, share a startling statistic, use humor

The AIDA approach for employment application messages

- Attention, interest, desire, action - Getting attention: opening paragraph must: explain why you are writing, give the recipient a reason to keep reading (immediate potential) - Building Interest and Increasing Desire: present your strong selling points, more complete picture of your strengths - Motivating Action: respectfully ask for specific action and make it easy for the reader to respond

Guidelines for selecting typefaces and font size

- Avoid script or decorative typefaces, except for limited special uses - Use serif typefaces with care and only with larger text - Limit the number of typefaces to one or two per slide - When using thinner typefaces, use boldface so that letters don't disappear on screen - Avoid all-capitalized words and phrases - Allow extra white space between lines of text - Be consistent with typefaces, type styles, colors, and sizes

Visual Ethics (pg. 226)

- Consider all possible interpretations and misinterpretations; view it from your audience perspective - Provide context - Don't hide or minimize negative information that runs counter to your argument - Don't exaggerate information that supports your argument - Don't oversimplify complex situations - Don't imply cause and effect relationships without providing proof that they exist - Avoid emotional manipulations or other forms of coercion - Be careful with the way you aggregate data

Six principals of effective visual design

- Consistency: visual parallelism - Contrast: depict items in contrasting colors for more emphasis - Balance: formal (arranged symmetrically), informal (more dynamic and engaging by weighing stronger and weaker elements to achieve an overall effect balance - Emphasis: the dominant element is seen to be as the most important; visually downplay less important items - Convention: conventions dictate virtually every aspect of design. (reading left to right or right to left (arabic)) - Simplicity; simple is better

Evaluating secondary research sources (pg. 346, 347)

- Consulting research that was done previously for another purpose. such as information like print and online periodicals, online databases, books, and other research reports

Strategy for writing routine and positive messages (pg. 262, 263)

- Direct of indirect approach - Start with main idea -Provide necessary details and explanation - Ending with a courteous close

Business applications of social media

- Integrating company workforces; social networks can help companies grow closer - Fostering collaboration; finding the best people to collaborate on projects, finding pockets of knowledge and expertise within the organization - Building communities; bring people together. communities of interest that form around a specific product are sometimes called brand communities - Socializing brands and companies; measure of how effectively a company can engage with its various online stakeholders in a mutually beneficial exchange of information - Understanding target markets; automated language-analysis software (sentiment analysis) - Recruiting employees and business partners - Connecting with sales prospects - Supporting customers - Extending the organization

Guidelines for writing readable content

- Limit each slide to one thought, concept or idea - Limit text content to four or five lines with four or five words per line - Don't show large number o tex-heavy slides in a row; give the audience some visual relief - Write short, bulleted phrases rather than long sentences - Use sentences only when you need to share a quotation or some other text item verbatim - Phrase list items in parallel grammatical form to facilitate quick reading - Use the active voice - Include short, informative titles - When combining visuals with text, the more information the visual can convey, the less work your text needs to do

Indirect approach for negative messages

- Opening with a buffer: a neutral, noncontroversial statement that establishes common ground with the reader - Provide reasons and additional information; phrase your reasons to signal that negative news head, present logical answers instead of hiding behind "company policy" - continue with a clear statement of the bad news; minimize the space or time devoted to the bad news - Closing on a respectful note; positive close with goodwill, suggestion for action, provides a look toward the future

Commensality

- Preparing and eating food together - Creates and cements relationships - Primal behavior that can be extraordinarily meaningful - Jealousy of romantic partner eating with someone else

Writing Strategies for Social Media

- Remember that it's a conversation, not a lecture or a sales pitch; "we talk, you listen" is not acceptable - Write informally but not carelessly; don't get sloppy - Create concise, specific and informative headlines; don't use clever wordplay in headlines - Get involved and stay involved; take the opportunity to correct misinformation or explain how mistakes will be fixed - If you need to promote something, do so indirectly; refrain from blatant promotional efforts in social media - Be transparent and honest - Think before you post!

Strategy for writing routine requests

- State your request up front: pay attention to tone, assume your audience will comply, be specific - Explain and justify your request: shows respect for your audience and also gets you a more accurate answer in less time - Requesting specific action in a courteous close: a request for some specific action, information about how you can be reached, an expression of appreciation

Applying research findings (pg. 358, 359)

- Summarize your research; an unbiased presentation of information regarding a particular topic, without attempts to draw conclusions or make recommendations - Draw conclusion; logical interpretation of research results - Make recommendations; suggest course of action

Purpose of analytical reports

- To analyze, to understand, or to explain a problem or an opportunity and figure out how it affects the company and how the company should respond. You'll be expected to make a recommendation based on your analysis - Reports to asses opportunities; market analysis reports are used to judge the likelihood of success for new products - Reports to solve problems; troubleshooting reports, whys something isn't working properly and what can be done to fix the situation - Reports to support decisions; feasibility reports, explore ramifications of decisions (such as switching materials)

Direct approach in negative messages

- Use the direct approach when your negative answer or information will have minimal personal impact - Opening with a clear statement of the bad news - Providing reasons and additional information; the amount of detail you should provide depends on your relationship with the audience - Closing on a respectful note

Behavioral Interviews

- You are asked to describe how you handled situations from your past - Require candidates to use their own experiences and attributes to craft answers - Review your work or college experiences to recall several instances in which you demonstrated an important job related attribute (to prepare) - Get ready with responses that quickly summarize the situation, the actions you took, and the outcome of those actions

Learning and effectiveness paradigm

- focuses on integrating deep-level diversity differences, such as personality, attitudes, beliefs, and values, into the actual work of the organization - Consistent with achieving organizational plurality - Values common ground - Focuses on bring different talents and perspectives together

Tone in business messages

-"You" attitude -Bias free language -Avoid euphemisms

Selecting and active or passive voice (pg. 129)

-Active voice: the subject preforms the action and the object receives the action: "Jodi sent the email message" -Passive Voice: the subject receives the action: "The email message was sent by Jodi" -Active sentences are usually stronger than passive ones -Using the active voice helps your writing to be more direct, livelier, and easier to read -Passive voice is often cumbersome, can be unnecessarily vague, and overly long sentences - When you want to be diplomatic about pointing out a problem or an error of some kind (the passive version seems less like an accusation)

Editing for Clarity and Conciseness(pg. 155-157)

-Break up overly long sentences -Rewrite hedging sentences -Impose parallelism -Correct dangling modifiers -Reword long noun sequences -Replace camouflaged verbs -Clarify sentence structure -Clarify awkward references -Delete unnecessary words and phrases -Shorten long words and phrases -Eliminate redundancies -Rewrite "It is/There are" starters

Five Steps of the Listening Process (pg. 48)

-Receiving: hearing and acknowledging the message, physical reception (nonverbal messages) -Decoding: assign meaning to sounds, which you do according to your own values, beliefs, ideas, etc. -Remembering: store information for processing; must capture in short term memory before being transferred to long term -Evaluating: evaluate message by applying critical thinking skills; separate fact from opinion and evaluate the quality of evidence -Responding: react, act on what you've heard

Techniques to improve readability

-Revise; make your document easier to read -To keep readers' interest, look for ways to combine a variety of short, medium and long sentences -Use lists to clarify and emphasize -Use headings to grab the readers attention and organize material into short sections

Communication Barriers (pg. 11)

Disruptions within messages such as noise and distractions, competing messages, filters, and channel breakdowns -Ex. Channel Breakdowns: a colleague forgets to deliver a message from you to your boss

Team Roles*

Each member of a group plays a role that affects the outcome of the group's activities. Driver, expressive, analytical amiable

Direct approach

Open with the main idea of your message and support it with reasoning, evidence, and examples

Concrete Words (pg. 130)

Stands for something you can touch, see, or visualize. Mot concrete terms are anchored in the tangible, material world

Factors for choosing communication medium and channel

The medium is the form a message takes and the channel is the system used to deliver the message. -Oral Medium, In-Person Channel: helpful in complex, emotionally charged situations -Oral Medium, Digital Channel: telephone calls, podcasts, voicemails, etc.; -Written Medium, Print Channel: when you want to make a formal impression, when you are legally required to provide information in printed form -Written Medium, Digital Channel: most of business communication efforts, look for ways to communicate more effectively -Visual Medium, Print Channel: photographs and diagrams, most will be used as supporting material in printed documents -Visual Medium, Digital Channel: can be the most compelling and engaging choice for many messages, although it is not always the easiest or cheapest format.

Indirect approach

You withhold the main idea until you have built up to it logically and persuasively with reasoning, evidence, and examples

High Context Culture

rely heavily on nonverbal actions and environmental setting to convey meaning. individuals grow up learning to recognize situational cues. Primary role of communication is building relationships

Content Elements to consider for reports

table 15.1 pg. 399