Communication Skills (CSK)

Communication Skills (CSK)

CSK 3105: COMMUNICATION AND LAW

This course is a practical survey of the law governing communication, especially practitioners working in the field. Coverage includes restraints on information gathering and publication, privacy, defamation, copyright, broadcast and cable regulations, access, electronic media, indecency, obscenity and pornography, media censorship, freedom of information and public rights to access, advertising and consumer regulations.

CSK 3104: EDITING AND PUBLISHING

This course will trace to process that takes manuscript from final draft publication. Topics covered will include copy editing, proof reading, fitting copy, working with authors, making editorial decisions and developing skills in critical reading. The course will also explore visual concepts that increase communication effectiveness through the printed word. The importance of selecting and co-ordinating format, layout, typography and illustrations is stressed.

CSK 3103: WRITING FOR THE MEDIA

This course provides students with the skills in the art of writing and techniques of good writing for the media. There will be an intensive component of writing to help the students communicate more effectively through the medium of the printed word and extensive out of class assignments or writing for a variety of communication media. There will also be a study of the elements that make news, sources of news, interviewing, writing style and structure, press problems and press-society relations.

CSK 3102: RESEARCH METHODS (CORE)

This course explores the nature of communication research and the place of qualitative and quantitative methods in that research. Emphasis will be understanding rationale for survey, textual, experimental, ethnographic, historical and descriptive research methods. It also provides an examination of procedures, strategies and assumptions associated with particular techniques of design and measurement, data collection, data preparation, data analysis and hypothesis testing and the writing of the final report.

CSK 3101: MODELS IN COMMUNICATION DISSEMINATION (CORE)

This course presents theoretical models for conceptualizing audiences, mass media messages and reception of messages in communication. It also examines the psychological and social character of audience experience by using models that analyse the uses and gratifications of mass media. Other topics include reception theory and studies of audiences as interpretive communities.

CSK 2213: RELATIONAL COMMUNICATION

This course explores communication patterns in the development and deterioration of interpersonal relationships. Functional and dysfunctional communication behaviours in family relationships and others relationships are explicitly explored. Theories on interpersonal relationships are explored to help students gain an understanding the role of relationships in human communication.

CSK 2212: INTRODUCTION TO ADVERTISING

This course is designed as a comprehensive introduction to the principles and practices of advertising. The role of persuasive communication tools is stressed. Advertising is also examined as an element in our social system; a business system; an art and communication form; and as a science.  The course also examines the distinctive features of advertising, information and persuasion; kinds of deviation from normal usage e.g. graphological, phonological etc.

CSK 2211: COMMUNICATION AND GENDER

Effects of gender on the interpersonal communication process. Construction of gendered identities via communication practices. Examination of theories of gender and the role of gender in organizational, institutional, and media communication practices. The course explores the ways people create, maintain, and augment the meaning of gender, developing insight into understanding gender ideology and the media representation of gender.

CSK 2206: COMMUNICATING LIFE SCIENCES

This course explores the structure, meaning and expressions of writing science, technology and science for mass consumption by non-professional audiences. It looks at the contexts in which such writing occurs and also looks at the constraints of those involved in producing this information. Topics include techniques of simplify scientific and technical material for specific audiences within the general public, audience analysis, communicating about risk products/conditions and the history and social structure of science.

Pages