ABSTRACT
“Message production” is a widely recognized area of communication research. This was not the case even 20 years ago. To my knowledge, O’Keefe and Delia (1982) were the first communication scholars to use the term in a chapter that analyzed individual differences in social cognition and multiple-goal messages. By the late 1980s, special issues of journals such as Journal of Language and Social Psychology (1985, Vol. 4, Nos. 3 and 4) and Human Communication Research (1989, Vol. 16, No. 1) were being devoted to the topic. Although absent from the subject index of the first edition of the Handbook of Interpersonal Communication (1985), message production appears in the second edition’s (1994) index. Littlejohn (1992) also includes a chapter on message production starting with the fourth edition of Theories of Human Communication.
