Integrative Journal the Knowledge I

Integrative Journal

The knowledge I have learned in this course has made me a much more capable communicator, which I believe will have a large effect on my future career. It has already had an affect on my self-confidence -- because I know that I am able to express myself with more clarity and effectiveness, I am more willing to use my writing skills in order to put my ideas forward. This means my communication is more effective if only because it will happen more often.

Specific examples of how I can use my writing skills in my current job include creating memos and signage informing both other employees and customers of things that are going on around the business. Also, I end up taking a lot of messages for my boss, and I used to simply leave brief messages with notes to see me for more details because I was not always sure how to effectively right down all the details. Now though, I am much more confident that I will be able to communicate all the necessary information in a written note without needing oral communication in addition.

These writing skills are especially significant compared to what I knew in the past because I can actually see and understand how they fit into the way that I think. Learning to think of writing merely as an extension of what is going on in my mind really helps to improve the effectiveness and clarity of my writing, and it is a much more integrated part of my education than I have felt in the past. At the same time, I feel that my previous knowledge and skills were not wasted, but rather are simply added to by the knowledge I have attained in this course. Issues of mechanics and everything else still apply, and now they are easier to understand and use because I see how they reflect shifts in thought and meaning, and how they come across to others.

Quote: "The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean."

Robert Louis Stevenson really like this quote because I think it very clearly illustrates the main problem that writing is concerned with -- communication. It is impossible to say anything -- let alone say it well -- if you do not know what you mean. I think that clarity of thought and clarity of words are completely united, and this quote is a very eloquent way of illustrating this connection concisely.