Is communication an art or a science?
Actually, I think it’s a craft.
We’re probably familiar with arguments around communication being an “art” and also that there is a growing appreciation of the role of evidence in understanding communication both abstractly and in practice. I argue that instead of contrasting “art” to “science”, we focus on the “craft” of communication. This is particularly relevant when considering teaching and assessing communication for specific professions, where learning through doing with individualised feedback is more likely to improve a learner’s communication skills.
A “craft” involves skills that “can only be learnt and employed in [a specific] occupational setting” and that are “refined through experience”.
By using the term “craft”, we can move away from the false dichotomy of art versus science in referring to communication and engage with the reality of conversation that incorporates and applies both in iterative, participant-managed ways. In doing so, we are resisting the notion that communication is either wholly subjective or objective. We can then more accurately reflect how we implicitly and explicitly improve how we communicate.
In analysing question design across a series of institutional phone calls, Heritage and Clayman use an analogy of a wind tunnel to describe how we learn and modify our conversational conduct through our experiences, finding paths of less resistance in the ways we choose to design each turn at talk.
“As in the design of a car, the aerodynamics of this question has gone through a wind tunnel of testing by repeated use. This judicious, cautious, even bureaucratic question design is the kind of design that develops in contexts where officials have to do interactionally delicate things on a repetitive basis.” Heritage and Clayman 2010, p.46
This is our implicit education in the craft of communication. In referring to coffee tasters, Liberman notes that “they say that by applying their knowledge and craft, they can repair nearly any difficulty”. That is, the skill of a craft is being able to use knowledge and experience to manage challenges in situ, as they unfold. This, too, is the goal of learning communication. The skill is in the responsiveness to each moment and knowing what each interactional choice is most likely to be understood as doing.
References
Gilligan, C., Powell, M., Lynagh, M. C., Ward, B. M., Lonsdale, C., Harvey, P., James, E. L., Rich, D., Dewi, S. P., Nepal, S., & Silverman, J. (2021). Interventions for improving medical students’ interpersonal communication in medical consultations. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2021(2), Article CD012418. https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD012418.pub2
Heritage, J., & Clayman, S. (2010). Talk in Action: Interactions, Identities, and Institutions. Wiley-Blackwell.
Liberman, K., 2022. Tasting Coffee: An Inquiry Into Objectivity. State University of New York Press.
Lynch, J.M., van Driel, M., Meredith, P., et al., 2022. The Craft of Generalism: Clinical skills and attitudes for whole person care. J Eval Clin Pract., 28(6), pp.1187–1194. https://doi.org/10.1111/jep.13624.
Travers, M., 2020. Craft skills and legal rules: how Australian magistrates make bail decisions. In: B. Dupret, J. Colemans & M. Travers, eds. Legal Rules in Practice: In the Midst of Law’s Life. 1st ed. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003046776.
White, S.J., 2025. Complexity and objectivity in teaching interprofessional healthcare communication. Patient Education and Counseling, 131, p.108558. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pec.2024.108558