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Business Communication
What are the active voice and passive voice? Discuss their purposes in detail.
An active voice is a sentence in which the subject that acts upon the verb is identified. However, in a passive, sentence, the focus is on the action rather than the doer. Thus, in a passive sentence, the subject is never mentioned. An example of an active voice is; John took his sick father to the hospital. This sentence may also be written in a passive form as; John’s father was taken to the hospital. One clear difference between the two sentences is that the former mentions an action as well as the doer, while the latter only mentions the action.
There is a different purpose that these voices serve. Passive voices are always preferred in negative events where there is a need to take the doer out of the picture. For example, someone may say ‘the food was poorly cooked’ to take the cook out of the picture and only focus on the negative action. Perhaps mentioning the person who did the poor cooking may cause embarrassment to the persons. Besides, passive voice makes it possible to state actions whose doers have not been identified and which when mentioned may attract legal actions. For example, it is safer to say that a man was murdered rather than mentioning the person who is suspected of making the killing. On the other side, the purpose of the active voice is to recognize positive events where it would be desirous of mentioning the doer of the action.
Discuss why effective communicators should vary sentence and paragraph length in their writing.
Effective communicators must carefully look at the length of the sentences and paragraphs. One of the features of effective communication is the ability to be as concise as possible. The meaning of this is that a communicator needs to strive to use as few words as possible in communicating an idea. When one uses very many words to express an idea, it is highly likely that many readers may find the communication to be boring and avoid it altogether. It is evident that when one is verbose, a lot of ideas may be lost within the many words, and the resultant communication may not be very effective. Evidence shows that when sentences and paragraphs are very long, it is always possible for people to misinterpret the communication or even give up and fail to read the message altogether.
Focusing on the length of the sentences and paragraphs helps to eliminate redundancies from communication. There are many instances where people realize that they have used very many words to express an idea that could have easily been expressed in a phrase or a word. The second reason why individuals need to focus on the length of their sentences and paragraphs is to eliminate outdated phrases. There are many phrases that people prefer to use yet they are outdated and meaningless.
List and briefly explain five visual enhancements a writer can use to draw attention to important information.
Writers need to make as much effort as possible to enhance the visual appeal of their work. There are several strategies that writers can use to achieve this objective. The following is a list and a description of some of the visual enhancements that can be used to make a piece of writing attractive;
- Enumerated and bullet lists; when items appear as a list, they create space between one point and another and the creation of the extra space makes the communication easy on the eye.
- Lines and borders; these features make the work colourful and attractive. This quality makes the piece of writing readable.
- Relevant images; the use of relevant images not only reinforces the idea being communicated, but it also ends the monotony of the writing.
- Tables and graphs; the use of simple tables and graphs may communicate what could have been said in very many words.
- Headings; headings are like signposts that direct the reader on the content of a piece of writing. It makes reading easy.