The Content of COMMUNICATIONS COURSES … 3

Abstract

HITHERTO, OVER‐EMPHASIS by teachers on the skills and techniques of writing has tended to obscure the fact that communication does not take place in a vacuum, but is always to someone, about something, and in some context. The consideration of these matters is at least as important as the skills of writing and the techniques of presenting written information. Indeed, no amount of purely literary expertise will by itself make a communication effective, and there is clearly an important sense in which such expertise is secondary and incidental — so that a person who writes well but cannot effectively relate his writing to the circumstances of the communication he wishes to make is comparable to a ‘ghost writer’ who does no more than improve the presentation of what may be the interesting and important but badly expressed ideas of someone else. Many technologists who become managers find themselves, because of their poor writing ability, obliged to use their secretaries as ghost writers — a frustrating and time‐wasting method, and one which can be entirely abortive if the secretary also lacks writing skill. The matter may perhaps be summed up by saying that the skills of writing are to the technologist‐manager what applied mathematics is to him as a technologist — something which must be competently known, but which has no immediate importance apart from the uses to which it is put.

Citation

Tyas, J.G.M. (1963), "The Content of COMMUNICATIONS COURSES … 3", Education + Training, Vol. 5 No. 7, pp. 332-333. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb015313