 Welcome to the Sailor-Otatomy course, Business 210, Corporate Communication. The goal of this course is to enable you to understand and apply effective communication in business contexts. This introduction video will preview the contents of the course. For instruction on how to navigate through the course, including accessing the syllabus, textbook, learning resources and assessments, please refer to the written material on the course home page. The textbook for this course is Scott McClain's Business Communication for Success. It contains 15 units. For the purposes of this course, these units have been grouped into sections around four themes. These themes represent important aspects of business communication. The foundations of effective communication, business writing, public speaking and presentations, and business relationships. Each unit is divided into subunits. To help you absorb the material in this course, additional resources are provided in each subunit. These resources are usually videos that reinforce contents in the textbook, provide additional perspectives on important topics, or connect key points from the textbook to real-world situations. Instructions for the resources provide guidance about what to focus on in the resources, and often also suggest exercises, activities, or sailor forum posts that will enable you to practice applying the material to business scenarios or projects. You should use these additional resources as alternative ways to understand the material. The Sailor Academy recognizes that different people learn in different ways, and has produced these resources to encourage you to discover how you learn best. Finally, each unit ends with an assessment, a quiz that will enable you to check your understanding of the unit's contents and to practice answering the kind of questions that will be on the final exam. From the beginning of this course to its end, it is important that you recognize how the topics relate to each other, including across units and sections. It is especially important that you understand and remember information in the first section because it is expected that you will apply the communication principles and practices introduced in that section to the activities and assessments you complete in the other sections and also to questions on the final exam. The second half of this introductory presentation will look ahead to section one and provide examples of the important relationships between the units. Before you begin working on a unit, you should always read the learning objectives. They are accessed by clicking on the course outcomes link below the unit's introductory paragraph. The learning objectives are important tools for recognizing content in the unit, which will be part of the final exam. Other material in the unit may also be on the exam, but you can be assured that if it is listed in the learning objectives, there will be at least one question about it on the exam. In unit one, you will learn about how the communication process works, why businesses require effective communication, and how your traits and your audience's traits influence communication. When you are working on this unit, it is especially important that you focus on three concepts that play a role in every topic covered in this course. The process that is communication, the messages that represent communication, and the audiences that are targeted by communication. The key point in unit one is that you understand the process of communication. When business communicators do not understand this process, they may be unable to anticipate factors that can block effective communication. For example, culturally based misunderstandings in the audience that are discussed in unit 15. Another example of this problem is covered in unit 10. Nonverbal distractions in the environment can also block communication. By understanding the communication process, effective communicators are able to analyze a situation and control or compensate for factors they know can result in poor communication. It is also important that you learn how to present the message that is central to your communication. This is the topic of unit two, which examines the relationship between language, messages, and communication. You will learn in this unit that there are three types of messages based on whether they are communicated intentionally or unintentionally, primary, secondary, and auxiliary. You will also learn about the five parts of the message, the attention statement, the introduction, the body, the conclusion, and residual messages. Here are some key points from unit two and examples of how they are related to the content of other units. Unit two emphasizes how an effective communicator knows what options are available for producing messages and selects the best option based on the business context. This point is connected to information in unit 10, which discusses how an effective communicator chooses words and other techniques to produce messages that are clear and convincing. The communicator also knows that the business context usually dictates message traits and formats. For example, if an employee is being laid off or denied a promotion, this negative news, a topic covered in unit 12, may be delivered more effectively through interpersonal communication, which is covered in unit 13. For example, you could call the employee. Communicating by telephone is covered in unit 11. By doing so, you can use the conversation to communicate your compassion for the employee's situation. Unit three in this course focuses on audiences, the people you want to influence through communication. In this unit, you will learn why understanding your own traits will help you communicate with others more effectively. What perception is and how your perception and your audience's perception play a role in communication and why it is important to listen and read for understanding. The key point in unit three is that you must know your audience so that you can tailor messages to suit their needs and expectations. This is necessary because audiences are not uniform and yet the characteristics they possess are not random. Effective communicators research the characteristics of their audience to ensure that messages reach them, are understood, and produce the desired response. This may seem very abstract to you as you begin this course, but by the time you have examined the context of business writing, public speaking, and business relationships, you will be more confident and better prepared to produce communication that will contribute to your success in the business world.