How to study communication studies: theories, theorists and readings

If you're looking up how to study communication studies, here's the short answer: this major is studied by comparing. Almost everything you'll cover is a set of theories and theorists giving different answers to the same question (what media do to audiences, or what audiences do with media), and exams ask for exactly that: place each theorist, set them against another, and use them to read a case. Study each theory on its own and they blur together. Line them up side by side from the start and they sort themselves out.

The problem specific to this major is lots of reading and no formulas. Lectures are slide decks full of names, schools and concepts that sound alike (culture industry, hegemony, agenda, framing), and behind every slide there's a long reading the professor assumes you've done. Exams tend to be essay questions, sometimes oral, and plenty of courses are graded on a paper where you analyze a campaign, a news story or a TV show using the theory.

It's not my major: I study computer engineering. What follows comes from looking closely at how communication is studied and tested, and from what we know about how people learn. It also works for the media and communication theory courses that show up in journalism, PR, advertising or marketing degrees.

Map the theories before you memorize them

The first hurdle isn't understanding a theory; it's knowing where it fits. A typical Communication Theory or Intro to Media Studies syllabus moves through these traditions, roughly in order:

1. Early media effects research. The idea that media inject a message straight into a passive audience (the "magic bullet" or hypodermic needle model), and the studies that pushed back, like Lazarsfeld's work on how people actually make up their minds in an election.
2. Functionalism. What media do for a society, with Lasswell's model: who says what, in which channel, to whom, with what effect.
3. Critical theory. The Frankfurt School, with Adorno and Horkheimer and their idea of the culture industry.
4. Cultural studies. The Birmingham school, with Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding model: audiences don't just receive a message, they interpret it.
5. More recent approaches. Agenda setting, framing, uses and gratifications, and everything that came with social media.

Before your first reading, sketch that timeline on one page. Every new theorist hangs off a school, and every school hangs off the question it was trying to answer. A theorist without a school is a name you'll forget. With the map in place, when the professor brings up someone new, you already know who they're arguing with.

The timeline isn't just chronology. A lot of theories exist to answer another one: cultural studies pushes back on the passive audience, and uses and gratifications flips the effects question around. Write next to each school what it's reacting against, and the course stops being a list and becomes a conversation you can follow.

One comparison chart, same rows for everyone

A communication exam almost never asks "what did Adorno say?". It asks "compare the Frankfurt School's view with cultural studies" or "what role does the audience play in each?". That's why the format that pays off most is a comparison chart, with the same rows for every theory:

• What question it answers. What that school was worried about.
• How it sees the audience. Passive, active, manipulated, resistant.
• What role it gives the media. A tool, an industry, a site of struggle.
• One key concept, defined in your own words.
• A criticism it received, and who made it.

The criticism row is the one that shows in an essay answer, because it proves you understood the debate and not just the definition. It's the same chart I recommend in how to study psychology, where you also have to compare theorists looking at the same thing from different angles.

One practical tip: fill in the chart as the semester goes, one column per theory, not during finals week. By the end you have a summary of the whole course that's already organized the way the exam will ask for it.

The readings: one sheet per text

Communication studies runs on course packs and long PDFs. Reading everything twice doesn't fit in any semester, so read once, read well, and leave yourself a sheet you can actually use later. One per reading, half a page:

• Author, year and school. So it goes on your timeline.
• The thesis in one sentence. If you can't do it in one, you don't have it yet.
• Three concepts, with the page where each shows up.
• One example from the text and one of your own, current.
• Who it argues with. Another author on the syllabus who says the opposite.

The sheet doesn't summarize the reading; it gets it ready to use. In finals week you don't go back to forty pages. You go back to the sheet, and to the pages you marked only if you need a quote.

A small trick that helps: write the sheet with the text closed, right after reading it, and only then check what you missed. That way the sheet is already a first round of recall instead of a copy of your highlights.

Apply the theory to something that happened this week

The applied side of communication is analysis: an ad campaign, a front page, a video that went viral, election coverage. In papers and on a lot of exams you get a case and you're asked to read it through the theory. That's a skill you can train, and it's worth training before anyone asks.

An exercise that works: pick something you saw this week and run it through three different theories.

• Agenda setting: what did the media talk about, and what did they leave out? What did they make you think mattered?
• Framing: from what angle did they tell it? Who comes across as responsible?
• Stuart Hall: what reading does the message invite, and what different readings did people make in the comments?

Do this once a week with a different case and you walk into the exam with your own examples, which is what separates a memorized answer from a convincing one. And if your professor shares past exams or papers, look at what kind of case they tend to pick and practice on something similar.

Oral exams and presentations, out loud

Many courses in the major have group presentations or oral exams. The only way to prepare for them is to say things out loud, not to reread them.

Take your comparison chart and explain one column to someone (or to the wall) without looking. Wherever you stall is what you don't understand yet. Then switch the order: start from a case and work back to the theory, which is how follow-up questions usually come. If you can't say it without looking, you don't know it yet. I go into more detail in how to prepare for an oral exam.

For presentations, rehearse with a timer and the actual slides. A ten-minute talk that's never been run start to finish takes twenty, and whoever goes last always runs out of time. Decide as a group who handles which questions, because the ones at the end are usually about the theory, not the case.

Lecture slides, without losing the thread

Communication theory slides are usually lists of names and concepts: "Culture industry · standardization · pseudo-individuality". In class the professor unpacked them with examples; in the PDF you're left with three words.

For that part you can use Filmina, a web app that explains your lecture slides out loud, one at a time, pointing at the part it's talking about. It also looks at each slide as an image, so it walks through a diagram or a drawn model (Lasswell's, say) along with the text. If something doesn't click, you ask Mina, the chat that answers from your own material ("how is Hall's decoding different from uses and gratifications?"), and then you can practice with questions built from the lecture. Reading PDFs go in too, so you can read them and ask about a passage. It has limits: it needs an internet connection, the free plan caps your minutes, and a scanned photocopy gets read through text recognition, which can slip on small print or a crooked page. The chart, the reading sheets and the case analysis are still on you.

Frequently asked questions

What do you study in communication studies?

Communication theory, sociology and semiotics, media history, organizational communication, journalism, advertising, research methods and, depending on the program, digital and video production. The theory courses carry the heaviest reading load and are the ones most often tested with essay exams.

How do you study communication theories?

Put the theories on a timeline grouped by school, then compare them in a chart with the same rows: what question they answer, how they see the audience, what role they give the media and what criticism they got. After that, apply each one to a current case.

Is communication studies a hard major?

There's no heavy math, but it takes a lot of reading, telling similar theorists apart and writing clearly. The hardest part is moving from knowing what a theory says to using it to analyze a case, and that comes with practice.

What are the main communication theories?

The ones on nearly every syllabus are early media effects research, Lasswell's functionalism, the Frankfurt School's critical theory, Birmingham cultural studies with Stuart Hall, agenda setting, framing and uses and gratifications theory.