This new edition of our text still has as its focus the traditional concerns of speech communication viewed within the broader perspective of human communication. As before, the term human is used to encompass numerous dimensions and contexts of communication, including public, organizational and mass communication. Three concerns have shaped the third edition of this textbook. The first is our desire to interpret and convey to students the dynamic nature of modern communication study particularly, its growing emphasis on the transactional qualities of communication. In addition to representing this transactional view in a more explicit way, we have updated many references and revised our annotated suggested readings to keep pace with recent literature in the field.