Three factors in the reader have a generalized effect on all perception, including reading: competence, purpose, and set. Competence involves applying past learning to new learning through transference, understanding the conventions of different types of texts, and transforming the text through the perceptual process into a new entity. Competent readers are able to trace hidden analogies; they also understand the nature of the reading process and are aware that there is no total absolute meaning. The second factor, purpose, includes the subconscious purpose of using the text as a source of pleasure through projecting fantasies onto the text and defending against elements likely to thwart gratification expectancy. Two forms of gratification expectancy in the reader/text relationship have been described as self-assertive and self-transcending. Readers also share the purpose of making their reading public, mediating the text for an audience or other readers. The third factor, the reader's set, is a complex web of expectations and past experience that forms the context within which the perception of the text is experienced; one of its features is expectancy based on past fulfillment from texts. The set involves different ego functions depending on the type of text being read. The set, including the willing suspension of disbelief, is partly self-determined but is also conditioned by learned conventions and is affected by authors' attempted manipulations of readers' responses. (GT)