INFO1111 Chap.10 Professional Communication and Writing
Professional Communication and Writing
This chapter covers the Week 5 communication lecture and the presentation activity in the Week 7 tutorial. It defines communication as an exchange of information through a shared system of symbols, signs or behaviour, and compares three models: transmission, interaction and transaction. It shows how to decide what change you want in your audience and how to start from what they already know.
It sets out the 7Cs for checking any message, clear, concrete, concise, considerate, coherent, correct and complete, and uses the lecture's three versions of an email to a lecturer to show tone.
It covers barriers to communication in IT teams, the SBAR structure for reporting a problem to someone who must decide, and the qualities of professional writing: clarity, precision, objectivity and brevity, built from structured paragraphs and exact words. It ends with the anatomy of a short presentation, from deciding the conclusion first to rehearsing against the clock.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Transmission, interaction and transaction models
- 02
Choosing a goal and reading the audience
- 03
The 7Cs of a message
- 04
Tone in emails to staff and clients
- 05
Five barriers in IT teams
- 06
SBAR for reporting problems upward
- 07
Clarity, precision, objectivity and brevity in writing
- 08
Planning and timing a short presentation
Worked example · free
Rewriting a vague progress update
- +1Rewrite: "Four of five features are complete. Login fails for users with accented characters in their names; the fix is in testing and due Thursday. No other dates have moved."
- +1Concrete and precise: "mostly on track" becomes four of five features, and "soon hopefully" becomes a named day.
- +1Complete and correct: the reader learns the cause, the status of the fix and that other dates are unaffected, so no follow-up is needed.
Key terms
- Transmission Model
- A model treating communication as a signal sent from a source through an encoder and decoder to a destination.
- Transaction Model
- A model in which both parties send and receive at the same time, with continuous feedback.
- 7Cs
- A checklist for messages: clear, concrete, concise, considerate or courteous, coherent, correct and complete.
- SBAR
- A reporting structure of situation, background, assessment and recommendation, adapted from healthcare.
- Topic Sentence
- The opening sentence of a paragraph that states the single idea the rest of the paragraph develops.
- Cohesion
- The logical flow of ideas within and between paragraphs that lets a reader follow an argument.
Professional Communication and Writing FAQ
What are the 7Cs of communication?
Clear, concrete, concise, considerate or courteous, coherent, correct and complete. They are a checklist for any single message, from an email to a status report, and a quick test before you press send.
When should I use SBAR?
When you report a problem to someone who must decide what to do. State the situation, give the background, share your assessment of cause and impact, then make a specific recommendation.
What are the three communication models in the lecture?
Transmission, a one-way signal from source to destination; interaction, with turns and a shared context; and transaction, where both sides send and receive at once with continuous feedback.
What makes professional writing effective?
Clarity, precision, objectivity and brevity, supported by clear structure and cohesion. Each paragraph develops one idea introduced by its topic sentence, and exact words replace vague ones.
Are the 7Cs and the 3 Cs the same thing?
No. The 7Cs check a single message. The 3 Cs, clarity, coherence and consistency, summarise the lecture's advice on writing a longer document, where flow between paragraphs and a steady style also matter.
Exam move
Collect five messages you have sent this semester, emails, chat posts or forum questions, and score each against the 7Cs, then rewrite the weakest. Practise SBAR on a real problem from your group project and read it aloud in under a minute. For writing, take one paragraph from an old assignment and check it against the lecture's tests: one idea, a topic sentence, no vague words and no unexplained acronyms.
Learn the three models well enough to give one workplace example of each. For presentations, plan a five-minute talk on any technical topic by writing the conclusion first, then rehearse it with a stopwatch until it finishes with time to spare. In the exam, keep handwritten answers short and structured; the habits in this chapter apply to your own answers too.
Ask a friend outside computing to read one technical paragraph you have written and tell you what it means; every place they stumble marks jargon or a missing step. Fix those places, then read the paragraph aloud to check the rhythm of the sentences.
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