There is no evidence which even remotely suggests that the needs for

. There is no evidence which even remotely suggests that the needs for

the messages communicated in letters, reports, and memoranda will decrease. And of

even greater importance, there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that these

messages can be handled in a way which does not require the basic writing skills.

Clearly, business writing is here to stay. In fact, the increasing complexity of the

technological world of the future is likely to require more-not less-of it.

A preview to the presentation

The foregoing review merely skims the surface; yet,

hopefully, it has given you an appreciation of the importance of communication to

yourself and to organizations. It has shown you how extensive communication is, how it

permeates every segment of the organization in a most intricate and complex way. And

it has shown you that good communication is vital to the successful operation of an

organization. These conclusions, combined with the convincing evidence that most

organizational communication is not well done, should lead you to yet another

conclusion: that communication is an area deserving increased study by those

concerned with improving the operations of an organization.

. In the following pages such a study is unde11aken. Its approach is first to gain an

understanding of what communication is-how it works and how it does not work. The

material covered here borrows from many disciplines-from psychology, sociology, and

linguistics. But primarily it borrows from the relatively new discipline of general

semantics. Perhaps the term general semantics requires definition, for the generally

used meanings of the two words in the term do not apply in this case.