Essay on Civil Engineering Is A Professional Discipline That Involves The Designing

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By: Kaung Htet Aung Communication in Civil Engineering Civil Engineering is a professional discipline that involves the designing, planning, construction and managing of any types of infrastructures. Civil engineering works could be as simple as building a small bridge over a stream or could be as challenging as building a skyscraper in heavily populated urban area. Unlike some other professions, civil engineering works could involve many different disciplines and different parties for one single project. Therefore, there is an important need for effective communication between different parties for the project to be successful.
The communication in civil engineering can be mainly divided into three groups, which are verbal communication, electronic communication and telecommunication. Verbal or spoken communication is the most frequently used and probably the most crucial type of communication in civil engineering business. During verbal communication, you can utilize non­verbal cues such as tone, body language and inflection. For instance, consultant engineers need to communicate with their clients in person to understand their demands and interpret them into a design. Then, once the plans have been developed and a bid has been taken, the contractor must understand the plan and again, explain the plans to the sub­contractors. All these tasks can be performed more easily and effectively with spoken communication. First of all, the clients are most likely to have no professional knowledge about civil engineering. It is difficult for them to convey their ideas and needs through written text. But verbal communication, with the help of body language or maybe visual aids, can help the clients and consultant engineers comprehend each other.
In civil engineering business, verbal communication often takes place in meetings. Since much of the engineering work centers around planning and decision­making, all the corresponding people often hold meetings to discuss about issues. During the meetings, engineers might also need to give presentation in which they verbally and graphically present the plans or designs to their colleagues. This form of verbal communication is definitely effective since all the related professionals in different disciplines can gather in one place and address all the issues.
Generally, verbal communication has few disadvantages in civil engineering if performed smoothly. But in cases of bad verbal communicators, it could develop into a horrible situation. Bad communicators could be those who can get emotional easily.
They could turn a discussion into an argument, causing others unable to carry on the work. A bad communicator could also be someone with poor communicative skills or someone who cannot use the common language properly. He might convey the wrong meaning to his colleagues without realizing. Therefore, even though verbal communication is undoubtedly the most important way, it could also lead to disasters when the communicators are terrible.
Electronic communication usually includes the use of emails, social networking sites and video conferencing. With the advancement in information technology nowadays, people can send or share information in an extremely fast way.
The information can be sent and received at any time and anywhere, as long as the communicators have a computer with an internet connection. In fact, these tasks can be done even more easily nowadays by using smartphones. Apparently, this form of communication is very convenient and saves plenty of time and money. However,

important and confidential information sent in this way has a potential risk of being stolen by hackers, which might lead to great financial loss. On the other hand, there is no guarantee that the information will be read by the recipient right after it is sent.
Video conferencing means using computers to provide a video­link between two or more people.