【托福写作素材】Personality

 【托福写作素材】 Personality

托福独立写作的话题有时候会涉及对“个性”或者"个人品格”的讨论。这些题目的特点就是 —— 抽象！同学们会觉得无话可说，或者说来说去再说一个东西。那么，我们就对这些经常会拿来讨论的 personality/characteristic 来做解析。比如下面这道2015年考过的真题：

Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? The most important quality for a politician or leader to have is goodcommunication skills. 

不难发现题目当中引起讨论的是 "communication skills" 这个品质。那么怎么去讨论和展开呢？

????思考逻辑如下：

good communication skills 的具体表现和行为是什么样的？

这些表现给团队中的个体以及整个团队会带来什么好处？

对应的素材：

To give overall attitude:

Good communication skills can help all aspects of people’s lives, from their professional lives to social gatherings and everything in between.

Good communication skills enable a politician or a leader to effectively connect with colleagues, build trust and respect, and feel heard and understood.

To describe the behaviour of a leader with good communication skills and list benefits:

1️⃣ A good communicator is always a good listener.

No one likes communicating with someone who only cares about putting in her/his two cents, and does not take the time to listen to the other person. In a team, a leader with good communication skills will pay close attention to what the other person is saying, asking clarifying questions, and rephrasing what the person says to ensure understanding. Through this kind of active listening, a team leader can better understand what the other person is trying to say, and can respond appropriately. And this will ultimately help to build the trust and respect between team members.

2️⃣ Good communication skills will boost effective communication, which helps to improve teamwork.

A leader who is good at communicating with other people may combine a set of skills including nonverbal communication,  managing stress in the moment, and the capacity to recognize and understand subordinates' emotions. Those skills play a vital role in improving communicating effectiveness and thus enable a leader to communicate even negative or difficult messages without creating conflict or destroying trust.

3️⃣ A leader with good communication skills tend to exhibit their confidence, manifesting constructive, assertive attitudes and thus improve decision-making.

Being assertive  means expressing personal thoughts, feelings, and needs in an open and honest way. If a leader exude his/her confidence, he/she will make eye contact or use a firm but friendly tone to avoid making statement sound like questions. This deepens the trust between coworkers and all the colleagues will follow the leader's instructions. 

除了上面的三点，一个有好的沟通能力的leader还会做到：

use humour appropriately to relieve stress when communicating

enter any conversation with a flexible, open mind even to accept criticism 

这些点同学们都可以去展开写。上面的素材积累后，在一些涉及讨论“人们比较重要的品格”时，都可以稍加改动用在作文中。