Page 370 - Effective Communication Soft Skills Strategies For Success by Nitin Bhatnagar, Mamta Bhatnagar

358 | Model Question Papers

Communication apprehensions are an important area of study in communica-
tion and are more interpersonally oriented. Communication apprehension means an
unwillingness to communicate and social-communicative anxiety; individual with
communication apprehensions are less likely to talk in social settings, and when they
do, they are less assertive. They also engage in less eye contact, are more defensive and
less self-disclosure. They are seen less positively by others in a variety of settings, such
as interviews and social interactions.

b. Punctuation indeed plays a major part in making writing easy to grasp. In his book
entitled, Spoken and Written English (Oxford University Press, 1989), the great lin-
guist M.A.K. Halliday maintains that punctuation, the mechanics of writing, has the
following functions:
i. Marking the boundary, e.g., a comma marks off a phrase, a list etc.
ii. Marking the status, e.g., a full stop or an exclamation mark at the end of a sentence
decides its status as a statement or an exclamation.
iii. Marking relationship, e.g., a hyphen suggests that a word is a compound word or
the apostrophe ‘s’ explains what belongs to whom.
In other words, punctuation as mechanics of writing gives our writing a spoken clarity
and intonation/stress effect.
Let us understand these functions of punctuation through a letter we often tend to
use. It is a leave-application. In every leave-application, we begin with the salutation
that ends with a comma (Dear Madam,) or we indicate the subject of the letter with
a colon (sub: leave application). These two examples show how punctuation ‘marks
boundary’.
At the end of our letter, we write ‘this is to request you to do the needful at your earliest’
and finally we add a full-stop, but we continue with, ‘Can I expect your response at your
earliest’, and end it with a question mark. This process exemplifies the second function
Halliday assigns to punctuation.
In our letter, we may write, ‘I shall not be able to attend to my duties as I have to take
my sister-in-law to hospital. Her doctor’s advice. . .’ The hyphens or the apostrophes
used here establish the third function of punctuation.
6. a. Who we think we are, is confirmed or denied by the responses others make to our com-
munication with them. Unless we get clear and supportive messages, we are not likely
to have effective communication experiences. We learn early in life to give and receive
responses which have effect on our feelings and self-esteem, as well as, how we accom-
plish our work without support for our activities, we cannot accomplish what we
want to accomplish. Much of the development of our self-esteem is intimately related
to our work, and roles we learn in the formal organizations where we participate. Much
of our sense of our inner-worth comes from performing the roles that society provides,
and we always try to measure up to it. Not being able to do so, leads to the loss of our
self-esteem.

Bhatnagar_Model Question Paper.indd 358 2011-06-24 3:12:37 PM