Objectives of communication - BBA - 1

Objectives of communication:

         

        The objective and purpose of communication are inter-related. Some of the major objectives of business communication are as follows.

1. To inform:

       The first and important objective of any communication is to inform. In today’s world, information is power. Communication bridges power through information. Spreading information covers a wide range of areas, both internal and external. People within the organization should be aware with the organizational goals, objectives, procedures, processes, systems, plans, priorities and strategies. The same way, information about external communication – with customers, prospects, competitors, suppliers and the public, about product services, plans, happenings, events and achievements.

2. To educate:

     Another objective of communication is to educate. There is a need to familiarize people with the system, procedures and process. The same process will extend to customer as well. This may be done through product literature, publicity, presentation and demonstrations.

3. To train

     Communication is an integral part of any training programme. Business organizations need to train people to achieve expertise in specific skills. Organizations have to provide working knowledge through training programme. Training sessions involve teaching, instruction, demonstration, practice and discussion.

4. To motivate:

       People in any business organization should be motivated by the organization to achieve goals and higher levels of performance. Higher level of motivation is must to ensure high levels of productivity. Communication provides the means to keep the motivation levels high. Talks, meetings, lecture, films, workshops and non-verbal messages are among the means used to motivate people.

5. To integrate:

      Large business organizations have different business units and departments. Each of them contains different goals, sub-goals and target sections. Communication provides the means for an integrated approach in achieving organizational goals. Effective communication is must to ensure that people working in different functional and geographical areas are integrated into well-knit teams and working to achieve organizational goals. Communication binds together people working for a common objective and helps team-building.

6. To relate:

    Good business relationships are must for the continued success of any business organization. It is communication that provides the means for building and nurturing mutually beneficial relationships. These relationships are both internal and external. They may be among or between employees, Supervisory staff, top management, customers, suppliers, press and other media. As part of the larger community, progressive organizations make it a point to relate themselves with the community at large. It demonstrates they are sharing and caring organization. All this is achieved through well-organized communication strategies.

7. To promote:

      Promotional effects are important part of effective communication. Promotion relates to various activities such as advertising, publicity, public relations and communication, which aim at customer information, customer education, and customer communication. 

By promoting the products, customers can get knowledge of the product and the needs of the customers can also develop effective demand for products, it results in developing the purchase and demand of the product. For example, financial service providers essentially sell benefits. For this they have to organize effective promotional measures, which seek to inform and educate the clients.

8. To entertain:

       Every business is not necessarily a serious business. Whatever may be the nature of business but there is a time for entertainment. Communication facilitates entertainment. It helps in social bonding and brings in lighter moments that help in releasing tension and getting rid of negative feelings.  Humour, when used effectively, can play a vital role in foresting positive behaviour in business organizations. In the entertainment industry, communication has a much bigger role to play. Communication can serve to achieve the objective of purposeful entertainment.

9. To facilitate decision – making:

       Decision-making constitutes an important function for any business organization. Well thought decisions, quickly taken, lead to better result. Such decision-making is spread all over the functional areas – marketing, accounts, productions and maintenance. Everyday different levels of organization take various decisions. Proper facts, figures, analysis, deliberations, clarifications, confirmation and evaluation, communication both – oral and written – facilities decisions – making in any business organization.

       Communication could have many objectives depending on the groups and context. Each group has different set of goals and adjectives. In each groups, the dominant objective of communication would be to inform, connect, educate, entertain, motivate, provoke and to integrate. Communication is largely goal-oriented and the objective of any personal communication would depend on the person or group.

      Communication helps to get across and accomplish results. The objectives, activities, and interrelationships of a business organization require communication to sub-serve its many various objectives. 

Reference book: - Business Communication. Sathya Swaroop Debasish & Bhagaban Das. PHI Learning Private Limited. New Delhi.  

 

Questions for students:

1. Explain any six objectives of effective communication.

Ballad - Explanation - BA

 Ballad - Explanation

Introduction:

         The simple definition of Ballad is,

“It is a song transmitted orally which tells a story”

The original version was composed by words of mouth. It is an art to produce songs and stories orally. Popular ballads exist with various forms.

Typically the popular ballad is dramatic and personal; the narrator begins with a dramatic episode to tell the story. The narrator tells the story briefly by means of action and dialogues and tells it without expressing his personal attitude.

- Origin and meaning:

          

        Ballad is a narrative set with music. Ballads derived from the medieval French chanson ballade, which were originally "danced songs''. The shorter oxford dictionary explains the meaning of the ballad as,

“A simple spirited poem in short stanzas, narrative some popular poetry.”

         Ballads are quite old. Most of them have been composed at time between 1350 and 1550. Ballad influenced the whole English poetry and English literature in general. They were widely used across Europe, and later in the America, Australia and North Africa. Ballads are often 13 lines with an ABABBCBC form, consisting of couplets (two lines) of rhymed verse, each of 14 syllables. Another common form is ABAB or ABCB repeated, in alternating 8 and 6 syllable lines.

        Ballad was often used by poets and composers from the 18th century onwards to produce lyrical ballads. In the later 19th century, the term took the meaning of a slow form of popular love song and is now often used for any love song, particularly the sentimental ballad of pop or rock.

- Subjects of Ballad:

1. Sex and violence:

         Ballad is a narrative poetry. It tells us the story. There are some subjects, which time and again come in the form of ballad and the most popular among them is sex and violence. ‘Children are thrown from castle wall on to sharp spears of surround by soldiers, guilty lovers found in their beds and bloodily murdered, Woman who poison their husbands and sell their children, men butchered in family quarrels and left on the road to be eaten by dogs and crows and girls seeded and cruelly murdered.

2. Supernatural elements:

        In those old days, people lived in the fear of war and violence. They also were feared from unseen supernatural dangers. That is the reason we find ghost, magic, witchcrafts and superstition in ballad.

“Lenore” is a poem by Burger, a German romantic poet. The subject of this poem is that the dead lover returns to take his bride with him.

3. Robin Hood Ballad:

       Robin Hood is one of the great English folk-heroes. He was probably a real historical character who lived in the English north middle part in the 12^th century. He was an outlaw and had his group. They were against the authority and they called themselves defender of ‘true’ justice. They helped the poor and the weak. Robin is a typical hero. These types of ballads are less tragic and more humorous. They are graceful. It is the quality that young readers favour them.

Three types of Ballad:

  

        There are three main types of ballads – the traditional ballads, the broadside ballad and the literary ballad. Traditional ballad is folk art, and older in origin than the other two. The authors of traditional ballads are unknown, since they were oral in origin; the broadside ballad was printed on a sheet of paper known as a broadside, and the literary ballad, the most recent of the three, is written by educated poets in imitation of the form and style of the popular ballad.

1. Traditional Ballad:

‘A short narrative song preserved and transmitted orally among illiterate or semi-literate people’.

    

       In the British Isles the folk ballad is medieval in origin; and it flourished into the 16^th and 17^th centuries. The most famous group of ballads in the British Isles is known as the Border Ballads, because they originated around the English-Scottish border. Narrative songs of this kind are found in all European countries, and in other places such as the American West in the 19C or the Australian outback.

2. Broadside Ballads:

     

      A broadside is a large sheet of paper printed on one side only. The broadside ballad refers to ballads which were sold on the streets and at country fairs in Britain from 16-20^th centuries. They were sung to well-known tunes and often dealt with current events, issues or scandals, equal of contemporary scandalous papers, Entertainment for urban rather than rural population.

3. Literary Ballads:

        

         Whereas the popular ballad is a piece of folk art, orally transmitted and of unknown authorship, literary ballads are written by educated poets in imitation of the form and style of the traditional ballad. From the time of Wordsworth, the ballad became an accepted and reputable part of the genre system of English poetry. In 1798, Wordsworth and Coleridge published a collaborative volume called Lyrical Ballads.

Examples: Samuel Taylor Coleridge's “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (sometimes 6 lines, sometimes with internal rhymes) and John Keats's “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”.

Characteristics of Ballad:

       

       Ballads begin just before the catastrophe or change which concludes the story, the time period is short. Ballads have been compared to the last act of a play. Ballads engage your attention at once. They begin in medias res (in the middle of things). Usually, the action is presented in a sequence of little dramatic scene, or in a question and answer format.

1. The Narrator:

     

      The narration of ballads is impersonal. We don’t get any clue as to the personality and nature of the narrator. There may be an ‘I’ in a ballad, but the singer tends to be a representative of some larger social structure – a community or nation. Mostly ballad contains third person narration, if the narrator is not speaking as the character in the story. 

2. Simple language:

       Some ballads, especially older traditional ballads, were composed for audiences of non-specialist hearers or (later) readers. Therefore, they feature language that people can understand without specialist training or repeated readings. 

3. Stories:

        Ballads tend to be narrative poems, poems that tell stories, as opposed to lyric poems, which emphasize the emotions of the speaker. 

4. Ballad stanzas:

        

       The traditional ballad stanza consists of four lines, rhymed ABCB (or sometimes ABAB) The first and third lines have four stresses, while the second and fourth have three. 

E.g. (‘Lord Thomas and Fair Annet’) 

He had a rose into his hand

He gave it kisses three,

And reaching by the nut-brown bride,

Laid it on fair Annet’s knee.

5. Repetition:

     

        This is an important feature of ballad. A particular version of this is called incremental repetition – a line or stanza is repeated but with additions that take the story forward by introducing new details.

     

        The question and answer format is common in many ballads, when a person – often a dying person -  is asked how he or she is going to organize his/her belongings, and he or she answers in a striking and often ironic fashion, usually ending with a curse on the victim.

6. Content

       In the ballads we find the same thematic mixture, we would find in modern bestsellers: Love and sexuality in various forms: Tragic love, Betrayal, murder and revenge, Magic and the supernatural, Stories of heroism, battle, adventure.

- Sophistication of the Ballad:

     Old ballads are not sophisticated poetry as of T. S. Eliot, Wordsworth but these poems were the most popular in those days. It is unfair to compare the poetry with sophisticated poetry. It has strange poetic qualities of its own.

- Renewal of Ballad (contemporary Ballad):

       

      In the middle half of the present century, Oscar Wilde (1854 – 1900) wrote the tragic and splendid “Ballad of reading God”, Rudyard Kipling used the old forms and styles in “Barrack Room Ballad” and W. H. Auden has written in the tradition of the ballad in “Victor” and “Miss Gee”.

   

     Many modern writers have continued writing in the ballad form; poets use it to create certain effects and songwriters (especially folk singer/songwriters) have continued the tradition of the oral ballad.

    

      The young groups of modern age sing Ballads with guitar at public house and coffee bars. 

Reference - Wikipedia

Communication skills - Structuring - BA

2. Structuring:

1. Organizing principals for presentation:

        When the presentation is facing an international presentation, and if he introduces his company by using drafts he can quickly became boring and there is also a risk of losing audience’s interest. If the presenter structures his presentation in interesting way then he can be sure that his presentation will be liked by the audience. During the presentation if the presenter shows least figures of company’s profit and progress, it is solid evidence and it becomes easier on the part of the audience to make decision.

The presenter should consider two approaches,

1. SWOT – Strength – Weakness – Opportunities – Threats

2. STEEP – Social – Technological – Economical – Environment – Political

        This will enable the presenter to analyse significant factors affecting product and corporate performances.

2. Making things crystal clear:

        Clear speakers inform the audience time and again in presentation where they have been, where they are and where they are going. A presenter should always navigate his audience regarding where the presentation has reach and what is coming up next.

        When the presenter is about to move to the next topic he should tell his audience by saying,

“Let’s move on to....”

       Inform your audience about the sequence that you have in your presentation. Presenter should make his audience clear about the structure of his presentation. When the presenter wants to develop the idea or some more information he should say,

“To expand on the little....”

      The final movement of the navigation is at the ending of the presentation. When the end is near the presenter should signal the end by saying in conclusion,

“I would like to say....”

       The presenter should bridge or rather link the two ideas or sections of the presentation.

3. Connecting ideas:

       When the audience is listening to a presenter, they produces some ideas and they think that presenter should support their ideas effectively and clearly with the use of phrases and words. While giving the presentation, to add something more to explanation there are some phrases,

- To add something more - ‘additionally’

- To contrast what he has said - ‘however’ and ‘whereas’

- To site an example - ‘for example’

- To generalize – ‘generally’

- To specify – ‘especially’

- To explain the purpose – ‘In order to explain the reason’ – ‘as a result’

4. Focusing on the key message:

        When the presenter wants to highlight or emphasize key points he put his point of view with some relevant points and audience takes the point in context of a message and an intention of a presenter which is,

“Key content within the message”

       To deliver the positive message, presenter need to work hard and focus on each word he speaks, so audience can also get positive intention behind the message clearly.

When the presenter tries to deliver a message forcefully it may happen that audience might not receive with ‘head to heart’ and therefore before delivering a message presenter need to research his audience and according to his audience he should adapt his style of delivering his message.

5. The art of improvisation:

- Open – ended approach:

     A presenter can prepare more flexible presentation style by using three tips.

1. Reduce:

     Don’t prepare too many slides, because more number of slides will not let you move with more flexibility in your topic.

2. Use:

     The presenter should understand how to make slides eye-catchy, for that he should not add too much content to the slide. The slide should contain important topics with bullet points.

3. Ask:

     Ask questions to your audience to know what they are thinking. What they know about the subject and their interests related the content. 

Reference book - Fifty Ways to Improve Your Presentation Skills in English by Bob Dignen 

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