Excerpts

We all know that communication is the process by which information is exchanged between individuals through a common system of symbols, signs, or behavior, and that one's communication effectiveness is measured by the ability to share thoughts and feelings through speech or writing. What few of us fully understand, however, is why some people are good communicators and why some are not, why some writers or speakers are more engaging than others in telling essentially the same stories, and why some less educated people are sometimes better speakers or writers than some high-level bureaucrats or academics with advanced degrees.

Indeed, no matter how impressive their credentials, some well-accomplished people simply couldn't communicate their ideas to us in effortlessly understandable sentences—proof that technical expertise or sheer accumulation of information doesn't automatically guarantee good communication skills. There's obviously some other factor in language that makes us either good or bad communicators, but precisely what that factor is often remains a mystery to many people up to the end of their days.

I must admit that it was only much later in my career as a professional editor that I discovered the reason. Communication theorists surely can articulate that reason more elegantly and authoritatively, but I will state it here as simply as I can: effective communication is the art of introducing or exploring new information or ideas with ones that are already familiar to the reader or listener. In even plainer words, we can communicate effectively only if we write or speak using words, meanings, and mental images that are already in our readers' or listeners' heads.

Why does communication work this way? It's for the simple reason that totally unfamiliar information baffles people and makes them terribly uncomfortable. Indeed, strange words and new ideas pose a threat to all of us. We get embarrassed when we couldn't fit those words and ideas with the knowledge that we already have in our heads. This is what happens when we, say, open a highly technical book and read from it, or when we mistakenly barge into a classroom where there's an ongoing lecture on, say, advanced calculus or perhaps polymer chemistry. Our natural instinct in both instances is to flee and steer clear of the threatening situation.

That same feeling of dread and confusion, of course, certainly would assault us every time we come across a supposedly scholarly passage like this one:  

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relationships in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power. 

That passage was written by a distinguished professor of rhetoric and comparative literature in a North American university, but why is it that to most of us, the passage doesn't seem to make sense? Linguists will say that it's because practically everything in the passage is lexical; that is, the passage consists mostly of unfamiliar word combinations tumbling one after another, hardly making any connection at all with what we already know. The passage is, in a word, pure gobbledygook.

What, then, do we have to do to communicate our thoughts, ideas, and feelings more effectively than that? It is, of course, to first entice our readers or listeners to pay attention and make an effort to understand us, and a good strategy for making this happen is to present new, unfamiliar information in the context of familiar words, familiar sentence structures, familiar lines of thought. We need to talk to our readers or listeners in a language they know. This way, they can more readily absorb the new information we are presenting to them, after which they can blend it with as little effort as possible with the knowledge that's already in their heads.

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