Toward a Better Understanding of Reader Analysis

Abstract

Business communication research on reader analysis has stagnated. This article examines why current business communication theory and practice makes new inroads into reader analysis difficult. To account for this lack of new critical thinking, the article assesses the field's confusion about critical terminology, its poor heuristics for assessing readers, its oversimplified cases, and its misleading message classification system. In addition, the article explores a new factor in reader analysis—readers' perceptual sets—as a way o f more accurately modeling the dynamics of the writer-reader relationship. © 1988, Sage Publications. All rights reserved.