Dr. Ruth Oji
A colleague once sent me a project brief that was, by any measure, impressively detailed. Three pages of specifications, timelines broken down by week, deliverables listed with precision. When I asked a clarifying question about the project’s underlying purpose, she seemed surprised. “It’s all in the document,” she said. And it was. Every word was clear, and every sentence was grammatically sound. Yet I had no idea what problem we were actually trying to solve or why it mattered.
This happens more often than we acknowledge. A manager writes a carefully worded email about a policy change and is bewildered when half the team misunderstands it. A consultant delivers a presentation with crisp bullet points and discovers later that the client took away something entirely different from what was intended. An academic writes an article that colleagues in the same field interpret in contradictory ways. In each case, the communicator did everything right according to the usual standards. The language was precise, and the structure was logical. The terminology, too, was accurate. The problem lies not in what was said, but in an assumption about how communication works.
Most professionals operate on the belief that clarity is primarily a matter of expression. If we choose the right words, structure our thoughts logically, and eliminate ambiguity from our sentences, we will be understood. This seems reasonable. It aligns with what we were taught in school about good writing. It matches our experience of reading well-crafted prose. When we encounter confusion, our instinct is to clarify our language further, to add more detail, to be even more precise.
