Communicating Professionally Critical Information Literacy

CRITICAL INFORMATION LITERACY

Critical Information Literacy: Communicating Professionally

Communications in academic or professional arenas differ from communications taking place at a personal level. For example, personal communication could involve jokes, gossip, humor, and playfulness with close ones, while communication with professionals includes a straightforward tone without comic relevance. A formal tone and word structure are chosen to be plain and serious in conversations.

Understanding the audience in personal and business communication is the key to the right form of communication. For example, when an email is targeted for a CEO of another business, for instance, to partner with the firm for mutual benefits, the conveyance of opinions and facts would be tightly structured. However, if an email is written to a friend where plans for upcoming vacations are intended, the email would be more informal, even sometimes using slang words that are understood by the same groups of friends or specific phrases created for conversations between the two special friends.

The intent of the communication is also the reason the communication between academic intellectuals and friends is different. For instance, disclosing facts about personal details, such as what happened within our family, what the father did and how the mother responded, etc., are some of the ways that are casual talks of daily lives that only friends could know about. In contrast, business professionals would not be interested in people's daily lives; rather, they would be more focused on achieving goals and accomplishing targets for the business. For this purpose, they would want client-oriented discussion, mostly regarding the business's products and services. Hence, the communications would be straight to the point, with no jokes in between. Moreover, in academic settings, the communication would be in the form of mentoring, tutoring, counseling, or supervising. At the same time, these aspects would not be encompassed in personal communication, where personal communication would relate to smiling, welcoming, showing compassion, and being full of emotions sometimes.