104 terms

Communication & Argumentation Glossary

The key vocabulary of Communication & Argumentation, each term defined in plain language. Start learning in the Communication & Argumentation subject, or drill these terms as flashcards.

Active listening: Reconstructing another person's meaning rather than waiting to reply.
Active voice: A sentence structure where the subject performs the action, usually clearer and more direct than the passive.
Analogy: Explaining something unfamiliar by comparing it to something the listener already understands.
Assertiveness: Expressing your needs and views clearly and respectfully, between passivity and aggression.
Audience analysis: Identifying what an audience knows, wants, and resists before shaping a message.
Authenticity: Communicating in a way that is genuine and true to yourself while still adapting to your audience.
BATNA: Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement; the measure of any offer and the source of leverage.
Bottom line up front (BLUF): Stating the main point or request first, then supplying detail — ideal for busy readers.
Bottom-line-up-front: Leading with the conclusion, then supporting it, so the listener has a frame.
Chartjunk: Unnecessary or distracting decoration in a chart that obscures rather than clarifies the data.
Checking for understanding: Confirming the listener actually grasped the idea rather than assuming they did.
Claim: The statement an argument asks the audience to accept.
Closed question: A question answerable in a word; efficient for confirming, poor for exploring.
Clutter (in writing): Needless words and empty phrases that bury the message; good writing cuts them.
Common ground: The shared understanding a team operates on; must be confirmed, not assumed.
Communication: The production of shared meaning between people, not merely the transmission of words.
Communication apprehension: Anxiety about real or anticipated communication, such as public-speaking fear.
Concision: Expressing an idea in as few words as needed without losing meaning.
Concreteness: Using specific, sensory, familiar detail rather than abstraction to aid understanding.
Congruence: Alignment between a speaker’s words and their nonverbal signals, which builds trust.
Constructive feedback: Feedback that is specific, actionable, and about the work rather than the person.
Core message: The single idea an audience should retain from a presentation.
Counterargument: An objection to a claim; a strong argument addresses the strongest one.
Credibility: Trust in the speaker, built by demonstrated accuracy and admitted limits, not asserted.
Cuneiform: One of the earliest known writing systems, developed in Mesopotamia around 3400-3000 BCE, partly for accounting.
Curse of knowledge: The difficulty, once you know something, of imagining not knowing it; the main source of unclear expert communication.
Data visualization: The presentation of data in visual form, such as charts, to reveal patterns clearly and honestly.
De-escalation: Restoring the conditions for progress when conflict has raised emotional noise.
Decoding: Reconstructing meaning from a message, shaped by the receiver's knowledge and expectations.
Deepfake: Synthetic audio or video generated by AI to convincingly depict something that did not happen.
Difficult conversation: A high-stakes exchange involving strong emotions, differing views, or something important at risk.
Echo chamber: An environment where people mainly encounter information that reinforces their existing views.
Encoding: Turning an idea into words or signals.
Encoding and decoding: Turning a thought into a message (encoding) and interpreting a received message (decoding).
Ethos: The appeal from the speaker's credibility.
Ethos, pathos, logos: Aristotle’s three appeals — credibility, emotion, and logic — used in persuasive writing.
Evidence: The facts offered in support of a claim.
False dilemma: Presenting two options when others exist, removing choices by describing them away.
Feedback loop: The receiver’s response that lets a communicator check and adjust whether a message landed.
Framing: The unavoidable selection of emphasis in presenting information; honest when it foregrounds truth, manipulative when it distorts.
Gaslighting: Making someone doubt their own perception or memory; the most serious manipulation.
Gish gallop: Burying an opponent in many weak claims so answering all is impossible.
High-context communication: Communication that relies heavily on shared context, relationships, and indirect cues.
Inoculation: Building resistance by exposing someone to a weakened form of a manipulation technique, explained.
Integrative negotiation: Seeking trades across differently-valued things to expand value before dividing it.
Interest: Why a party wants it; often compatible where positions clash.
Inverted pyramid: A structure placing the most important information first, then supporting detail — suited to online reading.
Jargon: Efficient shorthand between people who share it and a barrier to everyone else.
Kill your darlings: The editing discipline of cutting beloved passages that do not serve the piece.
Leading question: A question containing its preferred answer.
Listening to reply: Loading your response while the other person speaks; the default and weaker mode.
Loaded question: A question smuggling in an unproven assumption.
Logos: The appeal to reason — argument and evidence.
Low-context communication: Communication that conveys meaning mainly through explicit, direct words.
Manipulation: Moving someone through falsehood or by bypassing their reasoning.
Mass media: Communication technologies (press, radio, film, television) that reach very large audiences at once.
Medium: The channel through which a message travels — email, speech, video, chart — which shapes how it is received.
Movable type: Printing using individual reusable characters; developed in East Asia and, in Europe, by Gutenberg around 1440.
Narrative transportation: The experience of being absorbed into a story, which can shape beliefs and attitudes.
Natural frequencies: Expressing risk as counts (e.g., 10 in 1,000), which people understand far better than percentages.
Noise: Anything that degrades a message — physical, semantic, psychological, or status-based.
Noise (communication): Anything that distorts or interferes with a message on its way from sender to receiver.
Nonverbal communication: Meaning conveyed without words — through body language, facial expression, gesture, and tone.
Observation versus judgement: The distinction between what was seen and an inference about it; feedback should state the former.
Open question: A question inviting elaboration.
Paraphrasing: Restating another's point in your own words for them to confirm or correct.
Pathos: The appeal to emotion; honest when it makes a true stake felt.
Penny press: Cheap mass-circulation newspapers from the 1830s that made news affordable to ordinary readers.
Plain language: Writing designed to be understood the first time it is read, using clear words and short structure.
Position: What a party says they want in a negotiation.
Printing press: Gutenberg’s ~1440s machine that made books cheap and widespread, fuelling literacy and the spread of ideas.
Probing question: A question that digs into a previous answer, where the real information usually is.
Propaganda: Manipulation at scale — coordinated, repeated, designed to shape belief regardless of truth.
Protégé effect: The finding that teaching or preparing to teach something deepens your own understanding of it.
Pyramid principle: Structuring top-down — main point, key supports, evidence — so a listener can stop at any level.
Qualifier: A statement of how strongly and under what scope a claim is held.
Reasoning: Why the evidence supports the claim.
Rebuttal: The answer to a counterargument.
Receiver: The person decoding a message back into an idea.
Reciprocity: The tendency to return favours; an influence principle, honest or manipulative by its truth.
Reflective question: A question that mirrors back to deepen and confirm understanding.
Revision: The process of rewriting and refining a draft, where most of the quality in writing is created.
Ruinous empathy: Withholding useful criticism out of concern for feelings; the most common feedback failure.
Rule of three: Grouping points into about three, matching what working memory reliably retains.
Scaffolding: Building an explanation step by step from what the listener already knows.
Sender: The person encoding an idea into a message.
Shared meaning: An understanding in the receiver close enough to the sender's to be useful; the actual goal of communication.
Shared mental model: A team's common picture of how the work fits together, enabling coordination without constant communication.
Show, don’t tell: Conveying meaning through concrete, specific detail rather than abstract statement.
Signposting: Telling the listener the structure so each point has a place to attach.
Situation-Behaviour-Impact: A feedback structure: when it happened, what was observed, and the effect it had.
Social media: Networked platforms that let anyone publish and share, turning audiences into broadcasters.
Social proof: The tendency to follow others; honest when the consensus is real.
Steelmanning: Stating an opposing position in its strongest form before disagreeing with it.
Sticky idea: An idea shaped to be understood and remembered — often simple, concrete, and story-driven.
Straw man: Misrepresenting a position to attack a weaker version of it.
The medium is the message: Marshall McLuhan’s idea that a medium shapes society as much as the content it carries.
Tone: The attitude a message conveys, easily misread in text that lacks voice and body language.
Transition: A phrase carrying the listener from one idea to the next.
Voice (in writing): The distinctive personality of a writer’s prose — its rhythm, word choice, and attitude.
Warrant: The general principle licensing the move from evidence to claim; usually where arguments are attacked.
Weak ties: Acquaintances rather than close friends, who often provide new information and opportunities.
World Wide Web: The system of linked pages invented by Tim Berners-Lee (proposed 1989) that runs atop the internet.
Zero-sum thinking: Assuming a fixed pie where more for one means less for the other.

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