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APPLIED THEORY
SUMMARY
* Presents two approaches to understanding communication, the transmission model and the constitutive model
* Argues that the constitutive model can offer productive ways to reduce misunderstanding
Technical communicators are well aware of the potential for misunderstanding in their roles as communicators within organizations and as translators of information from technical to lay people. In fact, they spend much of their working lives trying to communicate clearly and avoid misunderstanding. Lack of clarity can lead to delays in completing work, to lost business, and to customer dissatisfaction. It has been blamed for everything from the delay in starting yesterday's meeting to the Challenger space shuttle disaster. If we are to address the problem of misunderstanding and try to avoid it more often, we have to understand what misunderstanding is and why it occurs.
In this article, I call on communication theory to offer two ways to think about misunderstanding, one of them quite familiar and the other probably much less familiar. Although both of these approaches contribute something to our understanding of why communication goes wrong, I hope to show that the second approach can offer a way to integrate the insights of traditional approaches to misunderstanding and lead to some productive ways to avoid or at least reduce some of the problems caused by misunderstanding. I believe that the key to reducing misunderstanding is ensuring that we share a context for understanding with our listeners or readers. In particular, I suggest that ensuring a shared context for understanding is a way to achieve clarity, the most valued characteristic of technical communication. Communication seems clear to the recipient precisely because the speaker or writer and the listener or reader share a context for understanding. Communication theory thus offers a practical approach to understanding why misunderstanding occurs and to finding solutions for daily communication problems.
COMMUNICATION THEORY
Communication theory offers (at least) two different ways of understanding what communication is and how it works: the transmission model and the constitutive model. Each of these models offers a different view of communication, and each leads to different kinds of solutions for the problem of miscommunication. The transmission model regards communication as the sending of messages. Many readers will be familiar with...