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 our effectiveness in doing this depends on our ability to share thoughts and feelings through speech or writing. What few of us may not 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.
IMAGE CREDIT: PHOTOS-PUBLIC-DOMAIN.COM It was only much later in my career as a professional editor that I discovered the reason, and I am stating it here as simply as I can. Effective communication is the art of introducing or exploring new information or ideas with ones already familiar to the reader or listener. Stated even more plainly, 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 uncomfortable. Strange words and new ideas pose a threat to all of us. This is what happens when we 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 would assault us everytime we come across a supposedly scholarly passage like this:
“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.”
The above passage was written by a distinguished North American university professor of rhetoric and comparative literature, but why is it that to most of us, the passage doesn’t seem to make sense? Linguists will say that it’s because most 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.
In fact, the real challenge in communication is not only to make our target audiences understand what we have in mind but also to make them accept it and act favorably on it. We have to communicate to get results—a process that goes beyond simple information transfer. We need to make ourselves thoroughly proficient in whatever language we choose to communicate our ideas, and in our country where English is the preferred language of instruction and business, this is all the more reason for us to make an honest-to-goodness effort to continuously improve our English.
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This is a condensed and updated version of a 792-word essay by the author in 2005.This essay, 2123rd of the series, appears in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Campus Press section of the November 3, 2022 digital edition of The Manila Times
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Developing our power over language(Next week:
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