Clarity from Managed Confusion
Daniel R. Boisvert, Ralf Thiede · 2020
Human languages are grounded in obscurity; its basic elements are meaningless. How, then, do human beings achieve clarity? We borrow a concept from Art Graesser: managed confusion. Clarity is not unilateral, as some outdated composition and rhetoric models based on encoding/decoding would have us believe. It is negotiated. To optimize content delivery, human beings use several information management strategies: the strategic use of proforms (such as pronouns, but there is an entire system of them in English), the ordering of constituents in a sentence, or the arrangement of presupposed and newly salient information in given-new chains and given-given chains. Clarity as alignment with audience needs is illustrated with a genre of writing that is most associated with clarity, definitions. Even a definition is tailored towards an audience; the definition for onion will certainly be different in a dictionary for a popular audience from an entry in a handbook for botanists. The chapter offers a range of strategies for aiming at optimal understanding in definitions. It also explains how famous authors use language to distribute the reader’s cognitive load across parsing, making logical connections, predicting plots, and updating mental event models, preparing the ground for a cooperative esthetic of literature.