Communication skills are one of the most important skills in the workplace since it defines a person’s character more than anything else does. Any form of communication especially the written one should be clear enough to be understood by any relevant person irrespective of their level of education. It is important for an individual to develop excellent workplace writing skills if they are to be effective in their communication.
The rhetorical situations that must be considered in this case include the purpose of writing the document, the audience who are expected to read and the ones who might want to read it even though it may not be necessary for them to read it. Moreover, there are the stakeholders, which include the people who will be affected by the success or failure of the document and the context, which is the background situation that made it necessary for the document to be developed.
By the introduction of rhetorical awareness, communication in the workplace has changed greatly from the traditional form that was mostly focused on learning the templates of different documents and reproducing them just as they were required to a form that requires more thinking in relation to the goals that the document is expected to achieve. Professional writers are now expected to focus more on the content than the format of the documents that they produce.
The format is not regarded with much importance since it does not assist the audience in understanding the paper. The writer should consider mostly their choices of words and clarity in language since these are the elements that will determine whether the reader understands the content of not. This approach where the reader is given more consideration is referred to as user-centered or reader-centered design of communication.
When applying the reader-centred approach, the writer should first think about any form of audience that may need to read the paper in terms of their expectations, characteristics goals and the context. On the expectations, the writer should think about the type of information that the reader expects to derive from the document.
The reader’s characteristics involve the type of audience in terms of how they relate to the information presented in the document. This also involves the positions that the readers hold in the organization and the amount of workload that they handle. Readers who have less work might be in a position to take their time I reading the document while this is hard for the readers who are in the managerial positions since they have a lot of things to look in to.
In such a case, the writer is expected to come up with a document that is brief and straight to the point so that the reader will not have to spend much time trying to get the relevant information from the document. The goal of the reader requires that the reader will get the relevant information from the document and finally the context is in relation to the situation that reader expects the document to address.
The reader-centred design has three levels that the writer should consider when creating the workplace documents. The first one if the document design. The documents should be presented in a way that is easy to go through.
This includes a clear statement of objectives and the contents of the paper at the beginning and clearly formatted page numbers and headers together with a properly formatted appendix at the end of the document to enhance the understandability of the document. Locker (2003) insists on the use of white space since according her this is one of the ways of making the paper appear more organized.
It is also important when considering the clarity of the document to use structural illustrations as this will enhance the understandability. Information design ensures that the reader can easily understand the document. It requires the information presented be more specific and directed to the point. The beginning of a document should be made up of an abstract or a summary of the whole idea behind the document.
Locker (2003) emphasizes that every other point should be introduced in a way that explains the concept even to the readers who have no background information on the subject. Sentence design should ensure easy readability of the document. Complex ideas should be explained in such a way that a reader who is not an expert in the field will be able to understand.
The writer should avoid using difficult terminology and where they cannot be avoided, a glossary should be provided. This will ensure that other stakeholders to the document who are not experts in the discipline it addresses are in a position to understand the document by reading it without having to refer to outside sources or needing translations.
From the letter, it is clear that the writer had a problem with the understanding of the rhetorical situations. In the first instance here he was expected to write a cover letter, he failed to understand the scope of the document. The function of a cover letter is to summarize the contents of the resume and to explain to the recruiting manager the reasons why you are the best candidate for the job.
It should have an introduction that explains who the writer is and their reason for writing the letter. They should then summarize their academic qualifications and the experiences that qualify them for the position they are applying to. Towards the end of the letter, the applicant should express their interest in the position by explaining the skills they possess that will be beneficial to the organization.
The grammatical expressions should be basic and clear considering that many people are sending their applications and the recruiting manager might not have the time to try to figure out the intentions of the writer.
Besides recruiting the new employees, he is also faced with a task of maintaining the database of the existing in terms of payroll preparation and other such duties. We can therefore conclude that the letter was rejected because it was not possible to tell its purpose by going through it. It required the reader to do some thinking before figuring it out.
When writing a cover letter, the writer should think about the interests of the audience, which in this case was to recruit the best candidate for the job vacancy. This person therefore has no time to read complicated grammatical sentences and they are supposed to go through a considerable number of letters. It should therefore be simple to understand and straight to the point.
The reason why the writer was told that his letter could not charm the employers was because of he wrote many pages which would definitely be tiresome to read and the sight of the pages would make the employers to dismiss the application without even reading the content.
In considering the purpose of the letter, the writer was supposed to understand that it was meant to give a summary of what was contained in his resume and not a repetition of the same. He did not need to provide the long explanations, which only diluted the content of the letter.
The context of a cover letter should include a clear statement of the reason why the letter is being written and in this case, it was to convince they employer that he was the best candidate for the job. He did not need to do this in so many words considering the position of the reader.
He was supposed to be clear in a way that attracts the reader automatically and to achieve this; the writer was expected to present a well-organized document that gives the reader a good perception of the writer even before meeting him. The stakeholders in this case included the recruiting manager who was too busy to read volumes of pages in one letter. It is important to note that this person was not reading the letter as part of leisure but instead it is a part of his work, which involves many other commitments.
The second document in the letter is the proposal paper, which was supposed to explain how the international financial reporting standards affect the financial statements of the company and how the statements could be prepared to make them appear different from the normal format. The writer had all the information on the subject but he was not able to present it in the correct manner since he never adhered to the rhetorical situations writing guidelines.
He failed to consider the audience who were not all experts in accounting and used the accounting terminologies with no explanations. He has also neglected the main points and ended up giving a lot of irrelevant information. When writing the proposal, he had only considered the knowledge that he had and ended up developing a document that only showed what he knew and one that any other person could have problems understanding the content.
He failed to consider the context of the document, which was to be the professional information presented in a clear and easy-to-understand format. The management was not interested in knowing the extent to which the writer was proficient in the accounting field. They wanted a document that could be read and understood by the non-account staff members without the need for interpretations.
The writer could have used Basic English terms and where it was not possible to divert from the accounting terminologies, he would have provided an index explaining their meaning. This would have ensured that the proposal was acceptable to the management. This is scenario was different from the learning environment where the instructors considered the terminologies more than anything else in the document.
The third document was a letter he received from his mother when he was in the military service. The letter contained content that touched his heart and made him cry.
The goal of this letter was to express her mother’s feelings towards the son and though she was not a very good writer, she managed to pass on her message just as she intended. The son was able to detect his mother’s emotions from the letter and this is what communication is all about. The reader should be in a position to tell how the writer was feeling when they were writing the document.
Writing is not about the use complicated terminologies but the art of communicating an idea, message or emotion to the reader. In this case, the mother considered her audience who was his son and despite the fact that she did not have the best command of language, she ensured that the letter was clear enough for the son to know how she was feeling. That is what the purpose of the document was all about.
In the context, the letter was written from mother to son and she therefore had no need to make it fancy or official since it was not to be evaluated at any point. In this case, there were no other stakeholders involved in reading the document and so her letter was fine as long her son could understand it. From all the three illustrations, this was the best document in terms of communicating the content to the reader, clarity and understandability.
This sounds absurd since it was the least official document and chances are it was not written with much consideration on the format, grammar and sentence construction. It however communicated its purpose more effectively than the others did. Excellent writing with an aim of communicating a message has nothing to do with the fancy wordings that people use to hide their writing weaknesses. These elements only make the document complicated and hard to understand hence distorting the whole message.
From this experience, the writer was able to discover his strengths and weaknesses in writing. He realized that his writing skills were more inclined to his experiences, feelings and thoughts and that is why he had a problem with the official letters and proposals where he was not expected to express his feelings.
He also learnt the importance of organizing the whole document in a simple way that can be understood by any person even without going to the details. This includes having a well-defined introduction, body and conclusion such that the reader can summarize the whole message by going through the introduction and the conclusion.
Besides this, he realized the need to improve on his diction, which is the choice of words, summarizing and presenting his points in a concise and effective manner, and to improve on his grammatical skills since correct is one of the essential elements in business writing.
The writer was also determined to learn more on all the other forms of writing required in the workplace, which included business letters, memos and the other forms of business documents.
One of the most important aspects in written communication is the ability to express the ideas in mind in a way that the reader can determine the writer’s mood from the document. This is one of the aspects that captures the attention of the audience and makes it easier for them to relate to the document.
This explains why the same person reading a letter from a member of the family and another one from the manager will always reflect two different reactions and this can be deduced from the facial expression and the comments that this person makes when reading the two documents both of which are letter but with different contexts.
Personal Evaluation
There are a number of core values and interests that I have developed and these happen to be the pillars of my life and career and this is explained in the following section.
My personality is that of a normal person and I am very active, as well as not talkative. I am one of the people who you can described as average, introvert or even conserved since I am not the outgoing type. I like working with logical ideas as opposed to disjointed ones.
These aspects made me realize that I am more of a mathematics and finance person since these are the disciplines I have been performing well in ever since I started school. When it comes to discussions and debates, I am always losing out since I am poor at supporting my ideas with words. I always prefer supporting myself with my actions. I major in accounting since I believe that is where I am meant to be given my character and interests.
My work prospect is to get an accounting job in the United States or to work for an international accounting firm in Asia, which is my homeland. I am also interested in working with an investment bank owing to the fact that I did my internship in this environment and I developed the interest of working specifically in the industry research department.
I do not mind working in a bank as well though this would not be my first option. Besides these, I believe I have the interest of working in a sports management company owing to the fact that I have always had an interest in different sports such as football, which is my favourite sport and basketball.
The most important element in my life that I value above everything else is my family. This influences the direction of my life in many ways since I would never leave my family behind in the name of working away from home.
Their presence in my life keeps everything else moving and this is one thing I like explaining to the people around me including my bosses to avoid being posted outside my hometown. The other thing I really appreciate is a conducive working environment. I would rather be working in a favourable environment and earning a small salary than work in a harsh environment with a huge salary.
I would like to work in a company where the management is kind to the employees and where respect is a core value. I would also like to work in an organization where my skills are appreciated and where I am given tasks that are in my line of interest, which is accounting since this is what I am confident with. I would also like an environment where effort is appreciated and praised verbally. These factors are more important to me than the salary in the organizations I dream to work with.
If I maintain the values, I currently hold dearly, I believe I will a very important person in future. First, I will have the best family ever since I will always be there for them. Now I am not married but I hope to do so soon to have the chance to bring up my own family. I will also encourage the members of my family to stay close to each other in all circumstances since this is what I have learnt from my parents and it is the best way to bring up a family in which the members care for each other.
I feel saddened every time I hear from the media of brothers who have turned against each other, or children fighting their parents and that is why I would like to be with my wife and children throughout so that I can avoid such occurrences from happening. My greatest wish in life is to grow old besides my wife, watching our children become successful in their careers and in the other aspects of their lives.
In relation to my career the fact that I consider the working conditions and job description more than the salary is a character I believe will take me places as far as my career is concerned. Many people get stagnant in their career paths because huge pay packages excite them and they end up working in areas that have nothing to do with their interests.
This means that they just work for the money they do not get any satisfaction out of the job. The result of this is poor performance and a feeling of wasted efforts, which eventually might be a source of distress to an individual. To avoid all this therefore, I prefer taking up jobs that are within my interests and that implies accounting and finance jobs are my first and only priority. I would rather search for a job for a long and finally land in one that fits my criteria.
I have the dream of becoming the chief accountant or the chief financial controller in an international accounting firm and that is why I base all my working experience in these two fields. The amount of experience I will get from the internships and the small low-paying jobs will determine greatly the time it will take for me to rise to the desired position.
I therefore intend to develop my career towards the direction I intend to go and finally, I believe I will be there. When I finally get to the top position, I would like the people working under me to have the best working environments.
That is why I choose to work in the conducive environment so that I will not have any intentions if revenging for the wrongs done to me by my bosses. I have learnt that most of the managers who mistreat their staff were at some point mistreated too and so they are doing it as revenge. This is what I would like to avoid by ensuring that the environment I am working in is not harsh. This I believe also gives me the best chance to learn and implement my skills without being afraid that the manager might scold me.
Finally, I mentioned that I would like to work in a place where my efforts are recognized and praised. This is because such an environment allows me to know when I am improving in terms of the quality of my work and when I am deteriorating.
From that, I will be able to know the areas that need more attention hence improving my skills by the day. In some organizations, managers are in the habit of just scolding their employees when they have done a mistake but they never remember to praise them when there is need to. Such a scenario affects the esteem of the employees and most of them end up believing that they never learn anything.
This deters their growth in their career and it affects the quality of their work. At the time when I will be working in the top positions, I would like to be a source of inspiration to my employees and always encourage them to learn from their mistakes and to take the risks of trying out new ideas in the workplace. This way, I will be pleased to watch them develop their careers under my leadership.
Before I get there, therefore, I would like to be allowed to explore my skills and apply them in the jobs that I do, so that I can also grow in terms on creativity and working skills.
Lessons Learnt From the MBTI Test
It is possible to determine the temperament type in an individual, which in this case is indicated by the information below.
My personality Type is: I (33%) N (38%) F (12%) J (67%) where I is introverted, N is intuitive, F is feeling and J is judgment.
I can therefore be described as:
- Practically articulated introvert
- Averagely intuitive personality
- Vaguely articulated feelings personality
- Typically manifested judging personality
My INFJ Type Description by D. Keirsey
Keirsey Temperament: Idealist
Description:
Seems like me: I have the desire to contribute to positively to the lives of the people around me just like Keirsey’s description of my personality type. I like encouraging people and watching them as they develop their potentials and hidden abilities. I also prefer working with individuals on a one to one basis and exercise my ability to influence their lives though from the background. I also believe that I am an idealist owing to the fact that I am not an extrovert and this gives me a problem in expressing my feelings. I am better placed in an environment where I am expected to think rather than feel.
Does not seem like me: I am not good when it comes to dealing with a group of people. I prefer working with individuals. I am not good in languages and I lack the poetic nature experienced in the people with the same temperament as mine. According to Schwegler (1997), most of the heroes with this personality type were either politicians or political activists and this indicates that it is a temperament that best fits social people. This renders me automatically displaced in this field.
Made me think about: People of my personality are not easy to interact with especially on social issues since they prefer keeping their personal lives to themselves. Their actions usually come as a surprise since it is never possible to anticipate what they can do or not do.
Personality Zone Careers: Best Job Fit for INFJ
Personality Type: Counselor
Description: this is a personality type for people who prefer to lead their lives privately. They can work in the discipline of education as professors, educational consultants or just as teachers. Since the career that fits this description perfectly is that of a counselor, most of the people with this temperament end up in fields such as religion, social services or designers.
Seems like me: I appreciate the values in people as well as their uniqueness and I like to discover my strengths and weaknesses and help other people discover theirs.
Does not seem like me: I am not a social person and so doing social work does not seem like me. Owing to my personality, I have also never considered taking a teaching job since group interaction has never been my thing.
Made me think about: after taking the personality test I started thinking of taking a career path in counseling since I discovered this was one of the best ways to add value to people’s lives and inspire them to develop their potentials.
Jung Career Indicator
Careers and Career Categories
Social service
Social work
Education
Librarian
Law
Health care
Early childhood education
Psychotherapist
Counseling
Art and Science
Design
Scientific experiments
The main conclusion that can be drawn from the results of this test is that everyone has their unique combination. This explains why we are all different yet each person has his or her strong qualities and weak ones too. It is not possible for an individual to possess a hundred percent of one of the temperaments. Instead, the default setting is that a person will have all the four temperament each at different capacities and this is what creates the characters in people making them different from each other.
Lessons learnt from the O-NET test are all concerned with the different job categories together with their temperament requirements as follows:
Most likely: Accounting and auditing clerk
Accounting and auditing clerks are involved in all the tasks that are related to the financial and accounting records.
They classify the financial records according to their respective categories and ensure that the records are always updated. Besides that, they oversee the accuracy of the financial statement as well as their compliance with the international accounting and financial reporting standards.
Some of the job titles that fall under this category include accounts clerk, bookkeepers, and accounts associates.
The main tasks here include working with the accounting software to come up with the financial records, reconciling the bank statements with the cashbook entries and ensuring that the financial reports comply with the international accounting standards.
A person handling this task should be in possession accounting and economics knowledge. They should also be good with arithmetic and must have some background knowledge on clerical procedures. They should have the ability to organize information and accordance with some pre existing rules, have the ability reflect on numerical problems as well as well-developed mathematical analysis skills.
The work context involves performing repetitive tasks with a high level of accuracy as a requirement. The people in this department spend most of their time seated behind the computers but the job involves a lot of paper work as well.
The workers must be conventional and enterprising. They should be willing to be supported in their work by fellow employees and be able to maintain good relations in the workplace.
The average wages in this employment are $16.08 per hour, the level of employment is at 2,064,000 employees. This type of employment is dominant in the retail and technical services industries.
Second most likely: Post-secondary business teachers
Post-secondary business teachers are instructors and lecturers in colleges and they mainly concentrate in business-related disciplines such as business management or business administration.
Some of the job titles under this category include business professors, management professors and business office technology instructors.
The tasks involved in this are giving lectures to postgraduate and undergraduate level students, preparing the course syllabus, monitoring, and evaluating the performance of the students by administering exams.
A person going for this career should have knowledge on administrative and management functions. They should also be well knowledgeable on communication techniques as well as accounting and economics disciplines. Besides this, they are required to have oral comprehension abilities, clarity in speech and the ability to organize information in logical manner.
The context of this work involves the prearranged lectures and the random ones. A lot of public speaking is involved and the instructor is expected to make major decisions frequently. The worker in this case needs to have excellent social skills, should be enterprising investigative as well.
The work values related to this occupation include the achievement mindset, independence especially in decision-making and recognition ability.
The average wage in this type of employment is $73320 per year and the approximate number of employees is 1,699,000. The dominant industry in this field is educational services.
3rd most likely: Credit authorizers
This job entails authorizing the charges related to the credit facilities on the customer’s accounts and this involves performing an analysis to determine which customers are credit worthy and which ones are not.
Examples of job titles that fall under this category include the credit manager and the credit director.
An employee in this position is expected to analyze the credit payment records, mail the credit information to the customers, maintain, and update the credit records.
A successful candidate for this job should posses knowledge the credit accounts requirements of the government, the legal issues related credit facilities together with considerable amount of clerical knowledge.
The person should have the ability to sense problems before they appear, be able to express themselves effectively in writing and have the visualization ability.
This job has a strict constraint and the employee is mostly required to create contacts with the customers together with the preparation of memos and letters.
The person should have conventional and enterprising interests for them to be effective in this job.
Average wages paid to the employees under this category is $15.36 per hour and the level of employment is at 64,000 employees. Finance and administrative industries are the most dominant in this field.
From the first section, this document addresses the following elements of communication in the workplace in relation to personal temperaments.
One of the main lessons learnt from this document is on the importance of conducting a personality test before recruiting an employee and allocating duties to them. People vary in terms of their abilities and one of the factors behind organizational success is to ensure that the employees are placed in their areas of expertise.
This promotes effectiveness in the workplace hence increased productivity. Most of the big organizations have adopted this criterion when interviewing individuals for different job positions and as a result the end up placing everyone in the departments where they can perform to their best. Many employers also analyze their employees using personality tests to understand them better. Some traits in people can only be revealed through testing and this is why most employers have adopted this system.
The use of MBTI tests in the organization is mainly to determine the weaknesses and strengths of the employees and to ensure that communication in the organization is carried out effectively amongst the employees and between the management and the subordinates.
This also makes conflict resolution easier as well as in the development of a training curriculum. The other reason why some organization take this practice so seriously is because of the notion that harmony in the work place is a result of there being an understanding of personalities amongst the members of an organization. This means that they know how to handle each other based on their different personalities.
Employers also consider personality testing as a way of improving the quality of their workforce. In fact, a recent research conducted on the fortune 100 companies indicates that forty per cent of these companies perform a psychological-based personality test on their interviewees before making the selection.
It is argued that this is one of the most important ingredients to their success. The American Management Association companies conducted another similar research on its members, which as well indicated that fifty percent of the best-performing companies conducted these tests before selecting employees in to their respective departments.
The different types of personality tests are used for different purposes in the organization. For example, a company dealing with sales promotions will mostly consider the level of introversion or extroversion in a person, while an audit firm will mostly consider the judgment capacity in an individual (Myers and Briggs 34).
The most common personality test however is the integrity test, which is usually conducted for all departments. These determine the level of honesty in an individual and the extent this can go and hence the management gets a basis for determining the people who can be entrusted with huge responsibilities. Personality-oriented integrity tests are a form of integrity tests used to determine a person’s reliability, sociability and trustworthiness.
Section one of these documents, which addresses the issue of workplace communication, put more emphasis on the importance of carrying out personality tests before making a decision on the career path to take. Employers also need this when allocating responsibilities. A good example is when the writer was given the task of writing a proposal.
The document he came up with indicates clearly that the person had expert skills in the accounting field, but he was not good in writing and that is why the audience had a problem in relating to his writing. A personality test could have revealed this weakness and that would have ensured that he only participated in the activities that were in line with his personality.
The rhetorical situations describe the character traits of an individual whose temperament categorizes them as writer (Anderson 34). Anderson (2001) goes on to explain that these features are able to capture the attention of the audience, stick to the purpose of the document, each content is the context of the whole document and all the stakeholders irrespective of their area of expertise can understand it.
The person who wrote that letter was however not in this category, and supposing he had taken a personality test before attempting to write the documents he wrote without being successful, he would have concentrated on his strong areas rather than attempting what was clearly not his discipline.
From the personality tests above, I can develop a logical, evidence-based hypothesis about my potential careers that are my best fit and this is explained in the following section based on the data in Table 1.
Based on my knowledge, abilities, interests, work context, job description and skills, the three careers which appear likely to be the best fit are accounting and auditing clerk, post secondary business teacher and credit authorizer and a financial manager.
Aspects of accounting and audit work that seem like a good fit are the context of the work, which requires that I perform most of my task while seated. Being an introvert, I would have a problem with a job that would require me to socialize. In this job, I am only expected to know how to use a computer, accounting software and how to fill in the ledger books and analyze the information therein.
Accounting and auditing work can however be challenging since it involves performing repetitive tasks that can get monotonous. This field is also highly competitive owing to the fact that it requirements are attainable to many people and hence this means that securing this job can prove to be difficult.
Aspects of post-secondary business teaching that are a big fit includes the knowledge required, my top most priority being accounting and economics followed by the administrative and management functions. My ability to organize information in a logical way is also an added advantage to me profile in relation to this job description.
This job can however prove to be a challenge for me since the main task under it is giving lectures to a class. This is disadvantageous to me owing to the fact that my social skills are poor. A successful candidate for this job is expected to be fluent in speech and they should possess excellent instructing techniques. These however happen to be my greatest weaknesses and they give me a disadvantage in this field, together with the fact that I will be expected to establish and maintain interpersonal skills.
Aspects of credit authorizers that are a big fit with my personality include the tasks involved in this job which are analyzing credit payment methods and maintaining the credit records, owing to the fact that I am have an analytical personality.
The fact that this job description requires me to have excellent decision-making and judgment skills also adds more points to my credit. The abilities I possess which include a high level of sensitivity to problems and the ability to visualize is another aspect that makes this job a big fit with my personality.
Credit authorizing however can be challenging for me owing to the fact that I am expected to create and maintain contacts with the customers owing to the fact that I am an introvert by nature. Interacting with people on a large scale and especially the people I am not familiar with is a big problem.
This field also requires a lot of knowledge on legal matters yet law is one of the disciplines that I have never visualized myself taking. Law requires a lot literal analysis while my personality is more inclined to arithmetic and discrete elements as opposed to the continuous ones.
The fourth priority is the financial managerial job, which fits my criteria owing to the fact that the most essential fields of knowledge are mathematics and accounting and economics. These are my best disciplines and even the education that I have acquired mostly revolves around these.
I also possess the skills of reasoning critically, coordinating and proper management of time as a resource. The fact that this job requires the candidate to have the ability reason analytically as well as high sensitivity to problems also gives me another advantage in this job category.
Working as a financial manager however would require me to be in constant contact with the public, which is one of the main challenges I might face in this job. The context of working in a team is the other challenge owing to the fact that I have considerably poor socializing skills.
To be effective in this position, one is expected to have sufficient knowledge in the human resource functions and this could be another challenge for me since I have always avoided disciplines that would land me in job that would require me to deal directly with people.
Table 1. Most Likely Potential Careers with Included Criteria
Works Cited
Anderson, Paul. Technical communication. Los Angeles: Thompson Wadsworth, 2001. Print.
Locker, Kitty O. Business and administrative communication. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003. Print.
Myers, Briggs I. and Kathryn Briggs. MBTI manual: A guide to the development and use of the Myers-Briggs type indicator. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1992. Electronic resource.
Schwegler, Anson. The Longman Writers’ Companion: Three Major Communities of Readers and Writers. Paris, London: Longman Inc, 1997. Print