An introductory letter via email

Dear Professor Blackstone,

I am Toh Shu Han, and I am a student from your Effective Communication class. I would like to formally introduce myself to you and hopefully learn more about you throughout the course. I graduated from Singapore Polytechnic in 2015 with a diploma in engineering with business. After graduating, I decided to further my studies in the Sustainable Infrastructure Engineering (Building Services) programme offered by SIT. Outside of school, I used to teach abacus classes for children before I was enlisted for my national service.

To me, communicating skills is an important skill to constantly develop. It is used in school, in work, and even conversing with our friends and family. The ability to express oneself concisely is crucial, especially during formal presentations and technical reports.

During my national service, I was given the opportunity to become a representative for my unit as a "welfare IC". This required me to attend meetings on a monthly basis and present any feedback to the officers. This in return, gave me the opportunity to practice my presentation skills in a more formal environment and I gradually improved in it.

As a result, I find myself comfortable speaking in front of a large audience. I also made sure that I practiced the presentation several times just before the actual presentation so that I would not miss any of the details out.

However, my weakness comes in the inability to write well in technical reports. Technical reports tend to have a formulated approach to meeting the intended objective, which appears daunting to me as I cannot seem to grasp it.

I personally believe that Effective Communication is one of the ways for me to practice on my report writing skills and to further improve on my presentation skills. My goals by the end of this module is to not only gain the techniques for writing a technical report, but also strive to improve my presentation skills.

Thank you for taking your time to read this email and I look forward to the coming classes.

Best regards,

Toh Shu Han
SIE2016 Class 1

Edited:
13 September 2017
25 September 2017

Blogs commented:
Chun Heng (Group 1)
Jun Peng (Group 5)

Comments

  1. UnknownSeptember 13, 2017 at 9:09 AM

    Greetings,

    To begin with, nice experience you had in your army days as the welfare IC and glad that you'd gained from it. I spotted several grammatical mistakes here and there in your writings though.

    1) Verb tense error such as 'communication skills has always been' (paragraph 2, line 1) where it should've been 'have' for this case.

    2) (paragraph 4, line 1) 'a group of audience' may not be correct since an audience consists of a group of people already. You may consider 'find myself comfortable speaking to a group of people' or 'find myself comfortable speaking to the targeted/intended audience'.

    3) (paragraph 4, line 2) 'I would not miss any of the details out' could've been 'I would not miss out any of the details'.

    4) (paragraph 6, line 2) 'is to not only gain...' could've been 'is not only to gain...'.

    5) Lastly, in paragraph 1 (line 2), do you actually want to 'learn more about him' or 'learn more from him'?

    Those are my thoughts on the grammatical errors in your writings.

    Best regards,
    Jun Peng

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Shu HanSeptember 27, 2017 at 1:36 AM

      Hi Jun Peng,

      I have read your comments and have made certain changes to my post. Thank you for your valuable feedback.

      Shu Han

      Delete
  2. UnknownSeptember 17, 2017 at 8:33 AM

    Hello Shu Han,

    Thank you for your introduction on this blog. A good presenter always rehearsal several time before presenting and what you had shared provides to me that you are always prepared to communicate with others with the right information.

    Here are some of my pointers on your writings,
    1) and even talking to our friends and family
    "and to converse with friends and family."
    - Since it a formal writing, it would be better to use the word converse instead of even talking

    2) For this sentence "My goal by the end of this module....." could be improved by "My goals by..." since you mentioned that you wanted to improve on both technical writing and presentation skills.

    Overall, there are my pointers for your writing and all the best for your journey in SIE2016 in achieving your goals.

    Yours Sincerely,
    Lewis Tan

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Shu HanSeptember 27, 2017 at 1:41 AM

      Dear Lewis,

      I have read your comments and made certain changes in my blog according to it. Thank you for your valuable feedback.

      Shu Han

      Delete
  3. Brad BlackstoneSeptember 19, 2017 at 1:56 AM

    Dear Shu Han,

    Thank you for this generally clear and concise letter. We learn quite a bit in the post about your NS experience, your view of your own communication skills and your thoughts on the value of communication, though it is quite short. You also have set at least one achievable goal for the module.

    Your language use is fluent in this letter, but there are a couple issues to take note of:

    1) ...communicating skills has always been regarded.... >>> (subject verb disagreement) ?

    2) problems with capitalization

    3) to writing a technical report >>> (collocation) FOR writing a technical report

    4) ...but also strive to improve.... >>> (vague expression in terms of a goal)

    I appreciate your effort.

    Brad

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Shu HanSeptember 27, 2017 at 1:47 AM

      Dear Professor Blackstone,

      Thank you for taking time to read my blog. I have made certain changes to my blog post according to your comments, though I am still not too sure what are the mistakes I have made in terms of the capitalization. Perhaps I can seek your help in class?

      Thank you once again Professor.

      Shu Han

      Delete

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