Goal 3

The third goal of the Honors Program is for its students to show excellence in both verbal and written communication. There are two outcomes to this goal. One, present ideas logically and effectively verbally. Two, present ideas logically and effectively by writing. This is an extremely important skill in and out of the Honors Program. The ability to convey opinions and ideas is necessary in the world and whether that is communicating with employers and fellow employees, family, friends, or anyone else you may meet. Communication is important in the Honors Program because many times students are called to write reflective essays or present ideas. Communication is a core tenet of learning in the Honors Program.

The first outcome is presenting ideas logically and effectively verbally. This outcome I have struggled with this outcome throughout my career at Minot State because I get nervous speaking in front of others. However, I have become better at it through classes in the Honors Program and from other classes in my career at Minot State. Another problem is finding artifacts I can share. Many of the classes that I took were years ago and much of the work I had done has been lost, but I have found some that I can comment on. The first artifact is my final presentation from my first Honors class and first semester in college: HON 191H - The Honors Community.

I am sharing this artifact not because it exemplifies what this outcome is about but shows what it is trying to correct. This presentation was on a student created learning experience. We were tasked with finding something we were interested in and learning about it. We shared what we learned with the others in class. My presentation differed from most of my classmates because it was not a hobby like many others had done. Mine was focused on the work my dad does. He manages Northwest Tire in Minot, and I had an interest in what he did for a while. There were only nine total words on my slides outside of titles. This may not have been so much of a problem if I could effectively communicate what I had learned, but I was a nervous wreck. The rest of the slides were no better. Four slides comprised nothing but stock images of equipment that no one would understand, and I would not do them any favors with my attempts to explain what they were. I am glad to look back at this presentation and see that I at least make better use of slideshows and am a better speaker. My second artifact comes from a year later in HON 250H - Foundations of Leadership.

This presentation focused on an ethical dilemma partners wanted to present and on providing a solution to a specific ethical dilemma using Kidder’s Checkpoints for Dealing with Ethical Issues (1995). Our presentation was on the human genome project. In layman's terms, editing human genes. This presentation went better. I was more confident and had another person who could not only speak so I did not have to the entire time, but to bounce jokes off each other did wonders for my confidence as a speaker and for the quality of the presentation. The slideshow itself was better than the first artifact. The slides had short summaries of what we were talking about, but still had the issue of not being descriptive enough and us having to fill in the gaps. Looking at the slides alone, one cannot decipher what we were talking about. Both artifacts are good at showing the progress that I have made with my verbal communication ability in the Honors Program.

The second outcome for goal three is to present ideas logically and effectively with writing. I believe this outcome is more important than the first outcome. The reason I believe this is that writing does not allow you to convey information through gestures, tone of voice, and images. Writing also can be read for a much longer time than a presentation. My artifact for this outcome comes from HON 252H - Visionaries of the Past.

In this class, we were tasked with writing weekly responses to a prompt. This artifact is from week six. The first paragraph of this artifact is a comparison of the troubles of Karl Marx’s time to that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson. The second paragraph is the creation of our own manifesto, like Marx’s “Communist Manifesto.” My manifesto focused on benefits to workers. I wrote about changes to overtime, maternity and paternity leave, vacation time, and profit sharing. This paper shows excellence in writing because we were tasked with two different objectives. We first needed to effectively compare two different groups of written works. The second is we had to compose our own opinions and support them. This artifact is also good at showing excellence because it differs from rigid academic work but allows us to express our own ideas in a more easily digestible prose. Many of the discussion responses written in this class shared a similar style. It is important to have a good grasp of both formal and informal writing, and this is just one artifact that exemplifies my ability to present ideas in writing.

Being able to present information both verbally and in writing is important both academically and in the wider world. It is more important today than ever before because of the advances in technology allowing individuals to share their work through the internet in things like blogs and podcasts. These artifacts have shown how I have achieved the third goal in the Honors Program.

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