Vague communication can cause confusion and misunderstandings, especially in legal matters. Students may unintentionally use vague language in their writing or try to impress with archaic terms, resulting in unclear messages. Good writing should focus on specific nouns and verbs, limiting adjectives and adverbs, and using only understood words and phrases.
Oral and written communications may be able to convey highly specific meanings, but they do so in an abstract way. Words represent things themselves, represent objects and ideas with nouns, actions with verbs, modifications with adverbs and adjectives, and directions or relationships between things with prepositions. Vague communication lacks specificity, using a category term instead of a precise one; for example, the word creature might refer to an insect, mammal, reptile, bird, or fish, but the word kitten is specifically a young feline.
Messages that contain a high degree of vagueness tend to cause communication problems because the recipient of the message has to assume, interpret, or infer at least part of the message. Such vaguely worded statements, questions or requests are confusing and lack clarity. In the worst cases, vagueness can erase the intended point of a message altogether.
Vagueness becomes an especially difficult issue when it comes to the law. Indeed, the term unconstitutional vagueness has come into use to describe laws and amendments that are excessively opaque to the average person. There are many court cases that have used unconstitutional vagueness as argument sufficient to successfully strike down a law, rule or other regulation.
Many high school and college students have written papers that meet length or word count requirements, yet get to say very little. Sometimes, these failures are unintentional. Students may believe they have achieved clarity because the words on the page seem to reflect their ideas. These students don’t realize that they are mentally filling in the blanks to arrive at a coherent whole.
Other times, the student tries to impress the professor by using archaic terms, long sentences containing sentence after sentence, or a great many words with Latin roots. These words may seem highly polite to the student, but in reality they don’t have the meaning the student intends or even don’t have much meaning. This type of essay is written not to convey information but solely to impress. Unfortunately, the opposite result is usually the result.
Well-written communications, be it student articles, articles in professional journals, articles in popular, trade, or hobo magazines or another type of writing, need to focus on the content before the language used to deliver it. Using as specific nouns as possible, limiting adjectives and adverbs in favor of specific nouns and verbs, and incorporating only words and phrases that the author fully understands are key to good writing. Vagueness or verbosity can never promote clear communication; it results in fuzzy and unclear messages and requires the recipient to figure out the original purpose of the message.
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