CREDO

Hi! Let’s start with a story from 2012. I had been figure skating for about 3 years at the time and was having a lot of fun doing competitions and performances.

As a 9 year old, I was filled with energy. But I wasn’t invincible, of course, and had many days where I wasn’t feeling great.

So one fateful day, I was finished with school and immediately had to go to the rink for a lesson. I got through my half of the lesson fine, but I still had to wait and practice while my sister did her lesson.

I was practicing in the middle circle just doing my thing when my two blades caught on one another and caused me to fall face first on the ground, to the horror of my mom who was watching from the side and the 4 other people on the ice at the time.

Long story short, I cut the side of my lip and sent my coach and parents into a frenzy trying to fix the problem. So by the end of the night, I was laying on a hospital bed in a nearby urgent care center with stitches on my face and tears in my eyes.

The important part of this story is that after I got the stitches, the doctor warned me that I wasn’t allowed to move my mouth for about a month. That meant no talking or making any facial expressions at all.

But for 9 year-old me, that was impossible and I got bored of playing charades every time I wanted to have a normal conversation. I wasn’t even allowed to go out into the sun even though it was the middle of July.

Without the ability to talk, my options for effective communication were greatly limited. While I didn’t realize this at the time, the whole experience taught me the importance of communication.

To try to remedy my loss of vocal communication, my mom gave me a notebook that she hoped could help me talk to people. But it proved to be a challenge and I gave up trying to use it after three days.

Speech is kind of like an art form. It’s not about the sounds you make with your mouth, but it also includes the tone and facial expressions that go along with it. And that’s not even touching on the ways other people can interpret your words.

Body language is a really important part of face-to-face communication. You have to be able to understand the movements others are making when talking to you in order to have a good conversation, otherwise misunderstandings could occur.

“Actions speak louder than words”. A common phrase to be sure, but I don’t completely agree with it. In my opinion, words and actions should work together for ideas to get across to others well.

And of course, once we talk about communication, the idea of texting comes up. The original use of phones were to make communication easier, but as more people text instead of talk on the phone, we miss out on one very crucial part of the process.

The tone of a message in text can often be misinterpreted and situations like these can lead to arguments. That’s why it’s generally frowned upon to break up with people over text because these types of things should be said when you can look them in the eye.

Not only tone can be misunderstood either, because typos are a thing that exist. So if you were talking to someone in person, you wouldn’t accidentally say Satan wrap instead of Saran wrap, but that’s happened to me when I’ve been texting.

Of course, texting isn’t all horrible, and I do think it’s pretty useful a lot of the time. The internet has a weird way of connecting people from all over the world within seconds.

For example, my sister just moved back home to the States and so now one of the main ways we talk to each other is through texting. It doesn’t even have to be really important conversations either, it’s just cool to be able to keep in touch.

In the end, the main objective of communication is to transfer ideas from one person to another. From personal experience, I think that verbal or face-to-face communication is really the best way to do that.

We were made to connect with other people, and God made us as a race of social beings. We’re supposed to form meaningful relationships with others, and one of the best ways to do that is to just talk.

Writing Process

Presentation

Reflection:

This project was pretty fun for me to be able to share this story and include a moral that I really believe in. Though it was hard finding interesting pictures and figuring out what to say in the right amount of time, I thought the experience was pretty good. I’ve never really been good at public speaking, so I’m glad I got to do this project since I don’t really practice these skills a lot.