Good Communication Revisited: Evaluative Rhetorics and a Disciplinary Commonplace

Abstract

Inquiry on “good communication” is diverse but disconnected. The purpose of this essay is to construct a pluralistic commonplace that structures how scholars and practitioners understand the concept of good communication. Drawing on interpersonal, rhetorical, and technical approaches, I argue that good communication is a judgment resulting from a social cognitive interaction between message features and sense making processes. Communication is deemed “good” in accordance with discursively contingent logics (i.e., rhetorics) of evaluation. The commonplace developed here enables systematic efforts to study or produce good communication by facilitating reflection on how “goodness” is constituted within any judgment.

Keywords:

• communication competence
• dialogic analysis
• grounded practical theory
• rhetorical situation
• technical and professional communication

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank the individuals who have reviewed the many versions of the arguments in this essay, including Jennifer Samp, Celeste Condit, Russel Hirst, and Michelle Violanti. The author also thanks the editor, editorial staff, and reviewers at WJC.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Manuscript History

This essay was derived from a series of course and conference papers drafted and presented over the last four years and across two institutions—The University of Tennessee and University of Georgia. An earlier draft of this essay was presented at the 2018 convention of the Southern States Communication Association.

Notes

1. The field was oversaturated with views on competence by the 1980s. A comprehensive review is beyond present scope. One alternative perspective of note is McCroskey’s (1982). In fact, Spitzberg (1983) first defined his perspective in contrast to McCroskey’s view. The essential difference between McCroskey and Spitzberg comes down to issues of locus, with the former locating competence in the social actor and the latter in perception. For a collection of other relevant perspectives, see Spitzberg (2011).

2. It is worth noting that Baxter and Montgomery (1996) argue the interpersonal competence model would be consistent with their approach under definitional constraints on effectiveness and appropriateness that essentially reproduce their dialogic meta-principles. In contrast, Spitzberg (2000) dismisses interactional competence as “anarchistic,” predicting that it will “end up on the scrap heap of logics that fail to attain normative ascension and consensus” (p. 114). With hindsight, I am inclined to agree with this claim since interactional competence has largely been ignored. Dismissing the perspective, however, would be a mistake because it encourages us to center, rather than resist, the situational nature of good communication.

3. I refuse to invoke Herbert Spencer without at least a footnote to unequivocally condemn the, as Hirst (2004) writes, “anti-religious, racist, elitist, socially oppressive, or otherwise evil implications or historical uses of Spencer’s overall System of Philosophy” (p. 270). Hirst (2004) provides a succinctly horrifying description of the circulation of Spencer’s larger corpus, which most notoriously trafficked among Nazi scientists. I discuss Spencer here only to contextualize brevitas, which is exclusively concerned with his thoughts on style.

4. A full explication of the connection between brevitas style techniques and the criteria to which they most directly apply is well beyond the scope of this essay. Future research should undertake a more precise mapping of these relationships.

5. As we shall see, my use of the term “negative dialectic” will differ considerably from its famous use by philosopher Theodor Adorno, who employs the term as a departure from Hegelian identity logics (Stone, 2014). Further elaborated later, my use refers to a dialectical reading of Aristotelian virtue ethics based largely in Baxter’s (2011) perspective.

6. I am not the first to draw attention to this similarity that connects good communication understood as techne and the ethical realm of praxis. Nearly two-thousand years ago, Quintilian emphasized the connection of virtue and good speaking (Bizzell & Herzberg, 2001). Some similar contemporary examples would include Hirst’s (2007) brevitas, which invokes virtue ethics to depict good communication, and Pearce’s (2007) coordinated management of meaning, which argues that good communication is a means by which individuals make wise decisions in critical moments of praxis. Furthermore, work in the rhetoric of science suggests that even matters of the episteme (i.e., study of objective truth) are at least partially adjudicated as indeterminate questions of value to the extent that ideology plays a determinative role in defining permissible empirical questions (for discussion, see Condit, 1996). In fact, there is strong evidence to suggest that an evaluation-function is simply inherent to human symbolizing (for discussion, see Condit & Railsback, 2005, especially chapters 7 and 9).

7. One potentially productive direction for this extension effort was illuminated by a reviewer of this essay who pointed out that the proposed commonplace of good communication focuses on a “message production” paradigm. This limitation is likely a product of the social cognitive framing of this essay that most readily informs individualistic inquires, perhaps best captured in Craig’s (1999, 2007) rhetorical, sociopsychological, and practical traditions of communication theory. While efforts were made to rein potential excesses of that commitment via poststructuralist intervention, this essay was ultimately inhibited from entertaining views that center systemic or relational ideals rather than individualistic message production. In this way, future work within the commonplace would benefit from a focus on perspectives in Craig’s (1999) systems-based traditions (e.g., cybernetic, sociocultural, critical) or what Baxter (2011) has identified as prescriptive dialogic perspectives (e.g., Buber, 1958; Pearce, 2007).

8. It is key to remember, after all, that any such grand theory of “good communication” would be bound up in the even larger philosophical question of “the good” that underwrites the study of values in general. I stress here that any extent to which I have developed a general philosophy of “the good” has been incidental to my purposes and is, as a result, necessarily underdeveloped.