The three laws of professional communication

The search for fundamental laws, unfortunately, has seldom, if ever, been applied to professional communication. Most how-to books on the subject seem content with long lists of phenomenological principles. Useful as each of these might be, a long list of them will always be hard to assimilate, at least without some perception of a simpler underlying logic. This article proposes three fundamental "laws of professional communication," on the model of Asimov's three laws of robotics. It motivates them on the basis of a simple premise, illustrates them with examples of oral, written. and graphical communication, and discusses their precedence and their subordination to a zeroth law.