Thu 30 Nov 2006
(World Trade Center, New York) There are places where one should be silent, and places where one should not be.
I wrote for the International Affairs Association Essay Competition and won third prize. My article is published in the Ambassador magazine. I will be getting a Foreign Affairs subscription as a prize. As the essay was simply a variation on the essay which Pin and I wrote for the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) essay competition in 2005, I will not be posting it up as there are few new insights in the essay.
Instead, do read my entry on the MAS competition here.
I set out to improve my spoken and written presentation skills this semester. I have taken every opportunity to work on improving these skills, as I felt that my ability to verbalize an argument was less than ideal. I definitely improved on this aspect. In verbalizing an argument, I must remind myself to think before speaking, structure my argument internally, and use vivid examples to simplify the idea for consumption.
December 30th, 2006 at 9:40 am
[…] This is another post on presentation skills, which was a core improvement area that I set for myself this semester (see this and this). This will probably be my last post on presenting for this year, but it will definitely not be my last for college. I was reading Beinhocker’s “Origin of Wealth,” which is an excellent book providing a different view of economics (will post more about it later), when I read that people are best at telling stories, and relating to stories . More specifically, Beinhocker identified how research revealed that people are most receptive to metaphors, are able to complete patterns by filling in missing information, and perform better at inductive rather than deductive thinking. […]