Purposes, General and Specific

All business communications have a purpose. Typically this purpose is the first step of the “Basic Communication Model” presented in Chapter 1 of Bovee and Thill. The idea that the sender wants to communicate needs to be encoded (this is the second step), and then produced in a transmittable medium (the third step). Before the second or third steps can be completed, the sender needs to do several things. One of the most important is deciding what the general and specific purpose of the communication really is. To help explain the importance and difference of these two purposes I’ve written about three examples of business communication that I am working on completing over the next few weeks.

My first example is presenting a case brief for BLAW 431. One of our assignments in this class is to review a case that will be assigned to us and create a case brief, then present that brief to the professor and class.

The general purpose of this presentation is to inform the other students in class about the case. The specific purpose is to point out the parts of the case that make it an important part of case law. In order to accomplish this I will need to follow a few steps:

1. Read the case file.
2. Determine all important take-aways.
3. Create an outline.
4. Write the first draft.
5. Edit and revise to create the final draft.
6. Create notes for presenting the brief in class.

The second example is creating a repair report for a customer. The shop I work at repairs electric motors. We recently repaired a large (4000 horsepower) motor, and the customer requires a repair report for the work completed on the motor.

The general purpose of this report is to inform our customer about the repairs performed on their equipment. The specific purpose is to help the customer understand what actions they need to take to keep the equipment from failing in the future. The following steps need to be taken to complete the report:

1. Gather documentation of repairs.
2. Speak with technicians about the cause of failure.
3. Determine what questions the customer might have.
4. Write a summary of the cause of failure.
5. Fill out repair report form.
6. Send to my manager for review.
7. Edit and send the report to the customer.

The third example I’d like to talk about is producing a work instruction for our quality management program. My company has decided that we need to ensure that a certain standard of work is being performed on all jobs. In order to accomplish this goal we need to produce a work instruction that can be followed by all employees.

The general purpose is to inform our employees about what is required by our quality program. The specific purpose is to create a way to monitor our work process so that we can ensure all steps required are being performed. To complete the work instruction I will need to:

1. Read through our quality management documents.
2. Create an outline of the process.
3. Create a first draft.
4. Review with my supervisor and manager.
5. Revise the instruction as required.
6. Format and publish the instruction on our intranet.

As you can see from the above examples, A large part of creating a business communication is planning. To ensure that your message transmits the idea that you want it to, you must have a clear goal in mind. This is why carefully choosing a general and specific purpose are so integral to effective business communications.

Thanks for reading; If you’d like to comment on this topic, I’d be happy to hear from you. See you next time!

-James Harder