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.
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