How can studying communication theory affect your life?

How studying communication theory can affect your life depends on how you study it and how you apply it. 

The first area in which professors hope your studies will affect your life is in making you a more critical audience for mass communications, able to see through advertising and political campaign promises and make informed decisions, and able to separate reliable from unreliable sources of information.

Next, you can apply communication theory to practical skills such as workplace communications and writing academic papers. Understanding the theory of communications allows you to create your own communication strategies applicable to a wide range of rhetorical situations as opposed to simply replicating a limited number of preexisting strategies by rote.

Finally, understanding communication theory is prerequisite to many types of advanced studies in such areas as business communication, information technology, and professional writing, and may be important for your major.