The Philadelphia Inquirer, Sunday May 30,2004.
Section M
Do We Care?
In business, even though communication is important, it's not everything.
"Would I be less inclined," Geoffery Nunberg, linguist and professor at Stanford University, asks rhetorically, "to invest in a corporation run by someone who doesn't speak in complete sentences?"
Look at Donald Trump.
When you speak well, it is assumed you are smart. But the converse is not necessarily true.
Of all the areas in which commmunication is essential, political campaigns may actually be one of the more forgiving. There seems to be a relatively high tolerance for politicians who don't always say what they mean, mean what they say, or even say anything meaningful.
"As a democracy, America has an ethic of equality. That leads us to hold our intellectuals in not very high esteem, because someone who is smarter than the average person is not playing by the equality rules," says Jon Radwan, a professor of communication at Seton Hall University and a board member of the American Communication Association.
"The people who have the crudest, simplest message often prevail because they can catch attention more quickly," says Andrew Robertson, author of The Language of Democracy.
it's vaguely depressing to consider, that as people talk of the "dumbing down of America," America seems to be dumbing down itself.
