ABSTRACT
The communication of information is often viewed as a simple process involving accuracy, objectivity, completeness, and most of all, clarity of language, sentence structure, organization, and images. In Houp, Pearsall, Tebeaux, and Dragga’s popular textbook, clarity tops the list of skills important for communication in the workplace (2002, p. 4) and is listed as the “most important attribute” of good technical writers: “Until the sense of a piece of writing is made indisputably clear, until the intended reader can clearly understand it, nothing else can profitably be done with it” (p. 6). But this ideal of clear communication rests on a misunderstanding of language as transparently representing the real world-what Carolyn Miller referred to as the “windowpane theory of language” (1979, p. 610)— according to which the world can either be represented as it clearly is or in a way distorted by the beliefs and intentions (or carelessness) of the communicator. As our society and the global world of work has become insistently more heterogeneous, inhabited by people with widely divergent cultures and values, the naïveté of the windowpane theory has become obvious.
