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In the criminal justice field, competent communication is important to ensure that target audience understands all aspects of the message trying to be put out and to build secure relationships with society. Competent communication is a two-way street between professionals and locals. In order for the two-way street to operate efficiently, the writers of reports and news headlines must write in a way that influences the locals to communicate back to them. According to White et al. (2016), "effective communication aims to get people to think, feel, and act in a specific way after they receive your message" (para. 6). In other words, communication is deemed effective when it evokes an emotional response from the targeted audience. Receiving responses from people can prove to be beneficial if there is a situation where professionals in the criminal justice field need information from locals about a case. Moreover, competent/effective communication in criminal justice isn't just a document that presents facts leading to a dead end. In order to warrant a response from locals, criminal justice professionals may need to stray away from their typical writing style. In Focus on Written Communication: Professional Writing, Reynolds (2020) writes, "writers must adjust their style, sentence structure, and word choice to the situation at hand" (para. 2). In her article, Reynolds (2020) outlines criminal justice writing as being effective when the writer doesn't try to write as if their in English class. Instead, writers should ensure that their writing is informal and direct with a clearly stated purpose. Overall, competent communication in criminal justice is the key to establishing good reciprocity between locals and professionals, while shaping those professionals into effective writers.

In my personal life, I've had numerous times where competent communication was not used. Most recently, I lost friends due to incompetent communication. In March, I made a social media post of one of my close friends stating how much I missed her and one of friends took offense to the post. The friend that was offended decided to leave the group chat we had without stating why. We were confused, so the friend I posted texted our friend to figure out what what was wrong and how we could solve whatever it was. She did state that she felt negatively about the post and she didn't want to be friends with either of us anymore. I tried to talk to her separately to explain that I didn't mean to offend her, but her mind was already made up. As of today, we still haven't talked to one another and we're not going to repair the friendship. The communication for this situation was far from competent because not only did the friendship end, but we weren't able to agree to disagree. Although we still may have ended the friendship, this situation could have been handled better if she had to spoken to me about how the post offended her and given me the opportunity to apologize. "My dear brothers and sisters, take not of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry" (James 1:19).