or, in some cases, simply inapplicable to student problems. When the student wanted or needed to write, a chapter on pre-writing in the best of textbooks did not give him very specific assistance in finding his own subject and treating it his own way. What both the teacher and the student needed was a strategy about writing that was broader and more practical in day-to-day situations than any that we had available. It seems to me that Wayne Booth's suggestions concerning may form just such a strategy. Before I continue, let me adjust my argument a little. First, as I have implied, I intend no disrespect to the useful work by semanticists, linguists, and others in the field of composition. Second, I am not suggesting that rhetorical stance is a cure-all, only that it presents a significantly useful technique for improving students' writing, one-and this is important-that they can carry with them into the real world. Finally, I should say that Booth is not responsible for any variations I have imposed on his ideas. Let's begin with Booth's own description of rhetorical stance: Last fall I had an advanced graduate student, bright, energetic, well-informed, whose papers were almost unreadable. He managed to be pretentious, dull, and disorganized in his paper on Emma, and pretentious, dull, and disorganized on Madame Bovary. On Golden Bowl he was all these and obscure as well. Then one day, toward the end of the term, he cornered me after class and said, You know, I think you were all wrong about Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy today. We didn't have time to discuss his objections, so I suggested that he write me a note about them. Five hours later I found in my faculty mail box a fourpage polemic, unpretentious, stimulating, organized, convincing. Here was a man who had taught freshman composition for several years and who was incapable of committing any of the more obvious errors that we think of as characteristic of bad writing. Yet he could not write a decent sentence, paragraph, or paper until his rhetorical problem was solved-until, that is, he had found a definition of his audience, his argument, and his own proper tone of voice.-Wayne Booth, The Rhetorical Stance, Now Don't Try to Reason With Me (Chicago: University of Chi-