Sam H Decay Article review

Sam H. DeKay, a vice president for corporate communications at BNY Mellon Corporation in New York City, looks into long existing issues in interpersonal communication in his article “Interpersonal Communication in the Workplace: A Largely Unexplored Region”. This article’s main purpose is to outline the limitations of current knowledge about the subject and to provide solutions which may help to fix this problem.
From the beginning author emphasizes the well-known fact that interpersonal communication skills are vital for modern employees to be successful. However, according to DeKay, today’s knowledge of the subject is very limited due to several reasons. One of the reasons is absence of common nomenclature, which should play role of a basis for successive studies of the interpersonal communication. DeKay claims that the previous studies are not of much value, since they failed to organize significant background for further investigation.
The other reason is the perception of interpersonal communication by different groups of people. DeKay states that nowadays employers appreciate speaking skills of their employees more than writing ones. He conducts a small observation of how business communication training providers meet the employers’ needs. Basing on his experiment, the author concludes, that ‘interpersonal communication in the workplace is considered a moneymaker’ and the positive outcome of interpersonal communication trainings almost doesn’t exist.
In the last part of his article DeKay presents the summarized outline of two articles written by Marcel M. Robles and Geraldine E. Hynes, to support some of his ideas and give a solution to one of the stated issues.
The channel of communication is formal article. Formal format of the message makes me to logically comprehend it, because the text plain and without any writer’s emotions.
The source of this article is a scientific publication, and the author occupies respective position in scientific community. DeKay does not simply state his opinion, but also supports it with his own research and researches of other scientists of this field. These facts make me as a reader to trust the information presented.
The article is written for people, who specialize in business communication and have some basic knowledge on the subject. The author uses a number of special terms (e.g. interpersonal skills, “soft” skills), formal language and the information he presents would be interesting only for narrow group of people. The target audience probably will be human recourses students and their tutors.
There are some negatively perceived non-verbal signals in the article. For example, DeKay uses italics to highlight his research results; however he could be more creative and use a diagram. In addition to that, the first paragraph does not have the indented line, while all the other paragraphs do.
The style DeKay uses made quite positive impression on me as a reader. Plain English and indirect approach make the text reader-friendly. However, there are terms in this text that need to be explained to an inexperienced reader and some words could be substituted by simpler ones (e.g. plethora, nettlesome) to make the reading process easier. The interesting thing about this article is that in the second paragraph DeKay catches reader’s attention by comparing the discussed topic with the geographical fact in history, which pushed me to further reading.
Article’s poorly arranged narration did not guide me through the text and led to further frustration. For instance, in the introduction DeKay speaks about two articles, which will be discussed. However, in the body there is much of other information, which I as a reader didn’t expect after reading the introduction. The author quickly shifts from one idea to another, there is no consistent narration. For example the author closes the fourth paragraph with the information about reviewed articles, but in the fifth starts to describe his own experiment. Moreover, there is no concluding statement in this article, which is why the main idea of it did not imprint in my mind.
Despite the position of the author in the society and the fact that the article was printed in scientific publication, it still does not seem credible and reliable because of some serious drawbacks. First, this article has poor referencing. DeKay gives reference for Reinsch and Gardner survey, but does not provide any references for Robles and Hynes articles. Second, the author doesn’t support some of his claims with evidence. For instance, DeKay states, that the ‘plethora of behavior modification training does not add greatly to our knowledge of interpersonal communication’, but does not support it with any facts.
To conclude, this article should be treated carefully. There are many of its limitations that readers should keep in mind. It is better to read full versions of two articles reviewed by the author for better understanding of the subject.