Post 3: Correspondence Critique

Dear All,

As most of you have suggested, the continual assessment 1 will be held on Feb. 20th (Friday), from 4.10-4.45 PM. The topic to be tested will be reciprocating compressor, especially two stage reciprocating compressor.

Yesterday, some of you also proposed a very good question, because of the slip effect, less power is required to deliver the same amount of fluid, it seems better for us to design a greater slip effect. Of course, the answer is not so simple. According to the equation 1.2, we can see, a less power means a lower compression ratio, for the extreme case, no power means no pressure rise. Evidently, it is not we hope to see. Sorry, I did not thought about it.

Regads!
XXXXX


This is an e-mail I received from a lecturer in NUS. He is a visiting professor and I must say he is a very good one in his field of study. His correspondence with us was about some technical aspects discussed in the tutorials and I believe that it has some shortcomings in his written communication skills.

First of all, he is not consistent with his tenses. He started to use the past tense and then shifts to the present tense. A flagrant mistake that he makes is ‘I did not thought’, this shows carelessness on his part. This could be the result of time factor as he was in a rush to send the mail and did not review it.

Next is the vocabulary issue, the word ‘Regards’ is written as ‘Regads’. This is an unacceptable mistake to make as it shows poor vocabulary skills and gives a bad impression for anyone reading this mail. Furthermore, quoting his phrase, ‘proposed a very good question’, I personally think that the verb ‘proposed’ is not the correct one in this context. Maybe he could simply put ‘asked’, as ‘proposed’ is used for ideas rather than questions.

In addition to this, his punctuations have some problems. Normally after the salutation close, we use either a comma or no punctuation but definitely not an exclamation mark. In his second paragraph, the first sentence is too long. He should have reduced it concisely and explained the technical aspects clearly.

Post 2: Interpersonal conflict

Interpersonal conflicts are part and parcel of our daily lives. For myself, I have encountered many such conflicts with my parents and friends but have always found a way to deal with it. However, one such conflict that happened one year ago is still fresh and vivid in my mind as I failed to resolve the situation.

It took place during an Engineering Professionalism module where I am required to do a group project and a presentation. In my group, there were two of my friends and another guy who we were unfamiliar with. On the first day itself, I found out something strange with his e-mail address- his NUS mail was unlike us with the typical ‘U05.....’. As I was the group leader, I sent everyone mails for our first group meeting and to our utmost surprise he did not turn up. I phoned him but he did not respond to my calls. In the next class, I asked him what happened and he told me he could not make it as he was very busy. I told him what we discussed in the meeting and gave him his share of work which had to be submitted in one week’s time. To our amazement, he did not submit anything. My group mates were very angry and wanted to report him to the tutor. I could not decide what to do as I did not want him to have bad grades because of us. However, due to the pressure from my other friends, I reported him.

Sometime later, I approached him and talked for a while. I found out that he matriculated in the year 2002, and it was supposed to be his last semester. He took 2 year leave as he suffered from a depression probably caused by terrible second year result. He was pressurised by the university officials as well as his parents to complete his degree. In addition, he had constant fights with her mother. I felt very sorry for him and realised I should not have report the matter to the tutor.

Therefore, my dear friends what should have been done to deal with this kind of problem?