Communication in Everyday Life is the first survey of communication textbook to explore fundamental communication concepts, theories, skills, and contexts with a thematic integration—the relational perspective—to everyday life that allows all of these things to cohere. The book's approach is to make the topics covered—self-development; interpersonal communication; group communication; public speaking; media/technology; communicating in the workplace and in public; etc.—coalesce by pointing out the relational basis of all communication as a major feature of students' lives.

This text provides a basic introduction to the usual topics that are covered in a survey text but does so in a number of different ways by emphasizing the importance of relationship contexts in the enactment of social life. In addition, Communication in Everyday Life extends the topical coverage with chapters on family communication, health communication, communication in the workplace, and communication in the public arena. The authors explore the ways relationships (between each other, between family members, between media and end-user or consumer, and between self and the community) affect communication, and vice versa.

When communicational life is seen as an everyday experience—and not some compilation of unusual or extraordinary sorts of activity that are usually offered in the separate and segregated topic chapters in most textbooks—then it becomes possible to explain many communication processes in a systematic and unified way, based on the fundamental relevance of human relationships to everyday experience. Even such activities as media consumption are moderated by the relationships with which people experience their daily lives. Hence, the underlying theme of relationships usefully connects many aspects of a survey text that will give it a coherence and a relevance to students that has been previously missing, obscure, or under emphasized.