Good Communication Revisited: Evaluative Rhetorics and a Disciplinary Commonplace

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 ar...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inWestern journal of communication Vol. 85; no. 4; pp. 527 - 548
Main Author Graves, Clint G.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Salt Lake City Routledge 08.08.2021
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Subjects
Communication
communication competence
dialogic analysis
grounded practical theory
Interpersonal communication
Judgment
Multiculturalism & pluralism
Rhetoric
rhetorical situation
technical and professional communication
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Summary: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.
ISSN:1057-0314
1745-1027
DOI:10.1080/10570314.2021.1887509