Dale Brashers was a brilliant scholar known for his work on uncertainty management for people with HIV/AIDS, his leadership of the University of Illinois Communication Department and it’s health communication program, and his mentorship of a generation of health communications scholars. He was also a dear friend and collaborator who had a lasting impact on me and on my work.

I was honored and pleased beyond words to give this year’s Dale Brashers Memorial Lecture. The talk was an invitation to revisit several decades of my work at the intersection of interpersonal communication and health communication and characterize what kinds of questions I ask and what drives the work that I’ve done. The list of questions I have asked is varied:

What these questions have in common (and what drives my work) are practical concerns about whether to talk, when to talk, how to talk, and with whom to talk. Illness and disability can change or create uncertainty about identities (who I am) and relationships (who we are to each other) and this is one of the reasons that communication may become challenging in these kinds of situations.

Simply telling people to “be open with each other” isn’t very helpful. “Being open” means different things to different people and even if we were to agree that it means “talk often without reservation about all the things that matter to you,” that isn’t always a good idea. Likewise, it isn’t very helpful to tell people to avoid speaking in a way that is critical, controlling, or negative. True, your loved ones are unlikely to appreciate it if you are critical (and etc.) but the problem with that advice is that few people set out to be critical so telling you not to do that doesn’t give you much guidance about how your conversations may be going wrong or what you could do instead.

Instead of telling people how to talk, I propose that we help people learn how to see the identities and relationships that are being communicated by the ways we talk. That, and describe a variety of ways that others in a similar situation have found to communicate support. There is no one right way to communicate, but being sensitized to how your conversations are coming across can help people figure out better ways of managing. That might be a different way of communicating (more direct, or less direct, for example) but it might also be a different way of interpreting what you or your loved one intends by the way you’re communicating. Sometimes changes to routines and resources can alleviate stresses and make it unnecessary to change how you talk.

That’s my Normative Rhetorical Theory in a nutshell. And the seeds (nuts are seeds, right?) of that way of thinking were planted in the work that Dale and I did together when we were both early- to mid-career faculty at Illinois. I’m so grateful to my colleagues at the U of I for the honor of giving the Brashers lecture and for the chance to reconnect with the many friends and mentors there who have supported my work.