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Effective group work communicat­ion

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If you are working on a group project, you will probably be exchanging a few e-mail messages. Here are some tips on keeping such communicat­ions simple and effective.

Decide on a plan

When you set up the job, work out who is going to do what and set deadlines. Write these down and confirm them. After this, discuss how you will communicat­e.

One way is to set up a bulletin board (a private Facebook group can work if your college does not provide facilities) where you all share. Agree on how often everyone has to check this.

Watch who you CC

If you are working in a small group and it is a short project, you can CC everyone on everything. However, this can snowball quickly. You can limit the e-mail chat by choosing carefully who you CC.

You may choose to e-mail one person 10 times over an issue and then issue one group e-mail when it is completed.

Use white space

If a message has three bits of informatio­n in it, write each one in a sentence and leave a blank line between them. This makes it easier to see, read and remember.

Edit replies

When you reply to a message, do not write your message on top and expect people to whiz through it to connect the dots.

Instead, respond to each point in the e-mail. This allows people to see the discussion in a threaded way.

Split topics

When one e-mail deals with three topics and then grows in length, feel free to break it up into three separate e-mail messages, each devoted to one discussion only.

This makes things more manageable – and you might be able to cut down the CCs too.

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