Reflecting About a Place In Our Environment

Places in our environment affect everyone in and around them. Whether we realize it or not, we are always in one. Places that directly affect us are those that are the most memorable to us. These places may consist of someone special that you’ve met, an event that helped change your life, or just a place where you ended up randomly.
A "place" is anywhere an individual is at any given moment in the environment. "Environment" is collectively all the places around us as a whole. Being present in a place means being in a certain area of the environment. Places effect everyone within the environment, negatively or positively, however, there is always a place that benefits us in some way.
Place and environment has always been in my life, without it I would not be myself. A place shapes an individual, and in my case it has shaped me to who I am. My current views and opinions have been created by the places in the environment that I have grown up in. As a result, I have learned that places can affect what a person believes in.
Environment plays a vital role in our communication skills because we learn from those places and individuals who surround us. At a young age, we learn to communicate to those in specific places; this helps improve our communication skills. We become comfortable with the individuals in our given area and this gives us confidence in our communication. Depending on our environment, we may become stronger in our communication skills than others. In a way, our environment helps enhance and hewn our communication skills.
In my situation I have grown up in a community that is very open with each other. At a young age I would visit with the older folks about things that were happing in their lives. Orally I became a strong communicator, I was very open and comfortable with expressing my thoughts by visiting with individuals. In my opinion, the environment really does affect how an individual learns to communicate; especially how they learn to communicate to others in a new environment.
I have grown this year in my communication skills and writing skills with help from working within groups and writing essays. I have learned to become more aware of my vocabulary in writing essays and during oral presentations. I have learned to fill in those blanks where I don’t know exactly what word to use in a certain situation. Improving my writing skills has played an affect on my oral communication skills by helping me find that certain flow in communication.
Working in groups has influenced my communication skills the most. I learned how to work with others that I did not necessarily know that well; this helped me learn how to communicate in different ways. I also thought peer-responses helped with my writing skills by helping develop new ideas for me to think about. I liked the respectful criticism that the peer-response allowed. This helped me see what others thought and how I could change my paper to make it more presentable.
At the beginning of the year I would say that oral communication was my strongest asset. I am not usually afraid of standing up in front of people to present a project or give a speech. I find myself struggling when it comes to writing, I didn’t usually use a wide variety of vocabulary. This made my work seem almost repetitive and boring.
The group project that helped my skills the most was the electronic project where we had to interview individuals about a certain place. This helped my oral communication skills the most because we had to give a presentation of us recording our voices. As a group we had to develop a script of what we wanted to say on the recorder. In my opinion this was the best project because we got to go out into the world to interact with other individuals.
Being apart of this class has helped improve my communication skills in many ways. I have learned how to interview people and translate their words into my own piece of work. Learning how to write an elaborate essay or paper is another aspect that I have improved on. Orally I have had to learn how to communicate to others while presenting information. All of these highlighted points of communication are essential in everyday life, and I can honestly say that my skills have improved.