LAUSR

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.