Our actions in education, business, and government are no longer guided by conscious ideals, but by entrenched practices that are products of expediency, indolence, and even tyranny. Inveterate and ubiquitous problems abound. Students hate school. Employees dislike their jobs. Professors become disinclined toward teaching. Boredom and procrastination are everywhere. There are promotion requirements (such as scholarly publications by college professors) that promote nothing and benefit none except to move the person into the next nominal category along the spectrum of the organizational ladder. We are plagued with senseless competitive patterns and numerical evaluations that make life a mere matter of "rat race", the winning of which does not uplift us into the sublimity of humanity, but trammel us in the degradation of being "rats". Essays in this book reflect on and search for answers to widespread and inveterate problems that degenerate modern life into mere livelihood. Products in sober solitude rather than in the societal cacophony, most essays in the book were written during the author's doctoral studies.
There is a mistaken assumption in many social sciences that knowledge will automatically translate into action. Based on this assumption, textbooks for basic oral communication, a required course in many college campuses, attempt to ameliorate students' communicational behaviors by teaching them knowledge about communication: theories, concepts, and terms. Not only failing their attempt, these textbooks also estrange students by belaboring what is "common sense" in students' perception. However, in reality, numerous social problems are not because of a lack of knowledge, but because of a lack of action or a lack of practice of the knowledge. In an effort to shift attention from knowing communication to doing communication, Cases of Problematic Communication confronts its readers with realistic cases of problematic communication and offers questions to facilitate your reflection and communicational action. Promising to transform the students' learning from one of passive cognition to one of reflective action, this booklet can also serve as a resource for commercial textbooks for oral communication.
Language is a passport to a culture. Slang, probably the most lively part of a language, is especially so. Understanding of a culture's slang is a great lens through which to know the authentic life of the members in that culture. Slang can also serve to spice up conversations with these members. In this light, a collection is made of undergraduate college students' slang-by college students themselves. For authenticity, more attention is given to comprehensiveness than to political correctness, although racist terms are avoided. This concise collection promises to give you a better understanding of and a closer connection with undergraduate college students.
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