Listening Skills Essay

Register to read the introduction… Preparing to listen would help me in my school and personal life. I could have arranged a friend to pick up my other kids, and I could have gone over the teacher reports, so that my son’s poor behaviors were not a surprise. In school, reading the required materials and printing off power points really helps me prepare to listen to lecture. Another skill that will help me become a better listener is to personalize the information while receiving it. As you are taking in information, it will have more meaning to it if you can make it relevant to your life or experience. Another good tactic is to try to put yourself in the speaker’s shoes so that you can have an understanding of their point of view. This would have helped me during the IEP meeting in understanding where my son’s teachers were coming from. A final skill that would help me become a better listener would be to understand or evaluate the part of my self-concept that makes me feel as though I need to defend my parenting skills. Understanding that pointing out my son’s bad behavior is not a personal attack on my parenting, but clearly just a function of my sons behavior, would help me NOT to be a defensive listener. Having the ability to identify my insecurities and try not to let them effect my process of listening will only help me become a better communicator and …show more content…
Every day, through television, radio, and even internet ads, we as a community are inundated with product rhetoric and messages trying to sway our opinions one way or the other. Unlike informative listening where the main goal is to acquire information, persuasive messages have an ultimate goal of selling a particular product to the consumer. It is our responsibility, as responsible consumers, to evaluate these messages and look for certain fallacies in the message. These fallacies are flaws in reasoning that are presented to try to sway the listener toward one point of view or the other. The evidence that supports the product or point of view is not always valid, but the speaker uses other deceptive reasoning to sway the listener toward their point of view. America’s advertising industry is filled with these fallacies, and if you are not careful, it is easy to become a victim of these advertising schemes. I watched a commercial for Wrangler Jeans that starred previous Green Bay Packer quarterback, Brett Favre. From the beginning I questioned what knowledge and skills a NFL quarterback possesses, to be a judge or endorsement for blue Jeans. If the product was sports related I may have believed some of his ideas, but the Wrangler Company is using the popularity appeal of Brett Favre to sell their product. This fallacious reasoning is called Ad verecundium, or an inappropriate appeal to authority where the speaker claims something is true because an esteemed person says it’s true. The only information on the commercial for Wrangler jeans is that Brett Favre “likes them, finds them durable, and comfortable”. There is no evidence about the material, thread count, or the durability of the product to help me come to an informed decision on the product. It is ridiculous that I am going to buy Wrangler Jeans