Acknowledgments

Writing this book has been informative, challenging, and rewarding and there’s no way I could have done it without the help of many people.

Thank you to Eastern Illinois University for being a great incubator for my ideas, research, and writing. I would also like to thank the School of Communication and Journalism at Eastern Illinois University for providing resources in the form of graduate assistants who helped with various projects during the process of writing Communication in the Real World.

I’m a huge fan of libraries and librarians. As information retrieval experts, they play a vital role in the educational and intellectual core of academia. I have to say a big “thank you!” to the faculty and staff in Booth Library at Eastern Illinois University, especially those in the Interlibrary Loan department who helped make it possible for me to get the latest books and research articles from 2022 to keep the content of Communication in the Real World up-to-date.

I’d also like to thank the team at FlatWorld that helped make this book a reality: thank you Sean Wakely and Briana Leonard. The people “behind the scenes” at FlatWorld who help make everything come together like images, graphics, figures, permissions, copyediting, and much more also deserve my thanks.

The textbooks produced by FlatWorld are of such high quality due to the rigorous peer-review process that the content goes through. I truly appreciate the time that other communication scholars and professionals around the country took to read, review, and provide feedback on this book. The content is better because of their efforts.

I wouldn’t be the teacher and scholar I am today without the mentors who have guided me and the students who challenge, motivate, and teach me daily. I owe tremendous gratitude to Elizabeth “Jody” Natalle who has been advising and guiding me for over twenty years and activated within me the desire to be a good student and then later a good teacher and scholar. Thank you to Joyce Ferguson, who I took small group communication with as an undergraduate. She’s one of the best teachers I ever had and later mentored me in her role as the Basic Course Director in the Communication Studies Department at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. Because of that experience, I became a Basic Course Director too and tried my best to live up to the amazing standards she modeled. Rounding out the core of my wonderful academic family is Bernadette Marie Calafell who advised me through my doctoral program and helped me navigate the transition from graduate student to professor.

Thank you to my friends and colleagues who have provided input or at least put up with my textbook authoring. My ongoing dialogue with Daniel S. Strasser about teaching, learning, and writing always help refuel my academic desires. My dinner conversations with Don Starwalt and Dr. Rich Cavanaugh are always edifying and help me process all of the “unprecedented” things we’ve lived through in recent years. Thank you both! And many other friends/colleagues helped with this book whether they realized it or not, including Alyssa Obradovich, Clinton L. Brown, Sam Szczur, Robert Guttierez-Perez, Teresa Maria Linda Scholz, Chris Wagner, Julie Patterson Broombaugh, Joshua Lunsford, Sherry Walker, Tracy Harpster, Val Tischler, and others.

And finally, I wouldn’t be the person I am without the support of my family and loved ones. My canine companions were very happy to have their “daddy” home and stationary for hours on end. Valerie, Ricky, and Casey Jones have gotten much pleasure out of telling people that their son/brother is a “textbook author,” and their love and support always help keep me grounded. And although the newest addition to my family, my nephew Murphy Lee, isn’t old enough to read college-level textbooks, I’m sure one day he’ll be very supportive of his uncle’s scholarly endeavors and may even write a book of his own. Joe Eichman should probably be listed as a coauthor of this book. Even though he didn’t write any of it, he witnessed (although endured might be a better word) the day-to-day process of a textbook author (for the third time now!) and experienced all of the ups, downs, and in-betweens that come with it. Thank you!