Clarity
The most important goal of effective communication is clarity. Clarity is not the same as simplicity. Richard Saul Wurman taught me this well. Simple things are clear if the message is intended to be brief and small, but often the message is about a complex relationship that can only be presented with a necessarily large amount of data. This complexity can be made clear through effective organization and presentation and need not be reduced to meaningless, "bite-sized" chunks of data. Clarity includes the focus on one particular message or goal at a time, rather than an attempt to accomplish too much at once. Simplicity is often responsible for the "dumbing" of information rather than the illumination of it.
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Copyright 1994 Nathan Shedroff