Whether communicating in writing or orally, effective communication requires ongoing attention to multiple levels of your presentation, from the level of the sentence all the way up to the level of the presentation as a whole. Communication is ineffective when it violates rules of correct communication and/or veers from widely accepted principles about how to present ideas.

Novice communicators struggle to communicate clearly due to lack of organization, too much or too little detail, or a weak grasp of basic conventions pertaining to word choice, grammar, punctuation, and sentence fluency. At this stage, your audience will find it difficult to figure out your main position and logic because the structure of your essay or talk fails to put the points worth emphasizing in places where they expect emphasis, such as the "early" and "late" parts of a paragraph, section, or overall work. Your work will retain the hallmarks of a rough draft: haphazard choices, typographical errors, and serial instead of logical structures (i.e., "this, that, and the other," instead of "this and that; therefore, this"). Paragraphs or sections may ramble on at length, with a "stream of consciousness" feeling to them, or they may be cluttered with "filler" words (like unnecessary "um's" or "also's"). Audiences are allowed few breaks in the stream where they can reflect on the point you've just established or transition with you to a new and related point. Beginners also struggle to find their own voice, instead relying heavily on excessively long quotations from others or poorly sourced paraphrases of someone else's material. Several of these problems often appear together in a novice essay or speech.

As you gain competence in communication, however, your writing will be structured so as to highlight and develop a central idea or theme. Key points are stated "early" or "late" in the text and/or its constituent parts, though some of your points may still be "buried" where they are hard to find, and you may still struggle to put your points in logical order instead of in a random sequence. Paragraph breaks, signposts, and navigational words (such as "such as," "however," "nonetheless," "moreover," "next," and "in sum") help to move the reader through the text at a steady pace, signaling emphasis as well as the relationship of the emphasized point to the main position. You usually convey your points with precise words and fluent sentences that engage the reader's interest, though the length and complexity of some sentences may still interfere with clarity and the amount of emphasis given to different points may still be imbalanced (some points are unnecessarily repeated, while others are unnecessarily truncated). Your work will show a good grasp of standard writing conventions and grammatical rules, though you may still struggle with one or two recurring grammatical problems. Through revision of your own work, you begin to minimize repetition, locate typos and run-on sentences, and carefully source quotations from or allusions to other authors.

Masterful style means being able to "pull together" all of these skills with minimal coaching or feedback. A masterful writer has internalized these writing conventions so that proofreading errors and unclear passages tend to be very few in submitted assignments. Only a few minor touch-ups would make the text suitable for publication or presentation in an appropriate "real world" venue. When audiences hear or read someone who has mastered the art of effective communication, they have little difficulty grasping the communicator's points and reasoning; whether one glances at the work as a whole, or zooms in to look at its constituent and detailed parts, it is clear that each word, sentence, paragraph or section has been the result of a deliberate decision.