Explicit and Implicit Strategies of Silence

Not much in communication studies is published about strategic silence and virtually nothing in the realm of professional communication.There is the Barry Brummett"s article, "Towards a Theory of Silence as a Political Strategy" (Brummett, 1980), which I will discuss below.There are two more notable titles, which deal with strategic silence in a more systematic way.One is Richard Lentz" "The Search for Strategic Silence: Discovering what Journalism Leaves Out" (Lentz, 1991).His eloquent historical analysis, however, focuses on strategic silences as editorial policies of the US legacy media.And Adam Jaworski, who has produced a seminal book on silence (Jaworski, 1993), and edited another one (Jaworski, 1997), returned once more to the topic to analyse, with Darrius Galasiński, "Strategies of silence: Omission and Ambiguity in the Black Book of Polish Censorship" (Jaworski & Galasiński, 2000).The focus, however, in this paper will be on silence as medium, not as contentwhen we talk not about silence but through silence.In this