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First, let me tell you how much I sympathize with you. This kind of situation is most difficult to deal with. I have dealt with it twice in the past, and now I attempt to head it off before it happens. The most serious case involved a young man who was provoking the young women in the course by writing a persuasive piece trying to convince them the prostitution was a great way for college students to earn extra income. He thought it was funny, hilarious, in fact. I didn't and neither did they. My response then was to tell him in his first draft that he had missed his audience. Neither I as a reader not the rest of the class were amused. His response, of course, was that we were all "politically correct" and lacked asense of humour. Because I warned him, I was able to justify failing the paper. However, I was not happy with the basis on which I did so. Now in my program here at Waterloo, I address the problem directly by bringing in Katz article on the Holocaust--that amazing memo by Mr. Just that talks about disposing of human beings in totally objective language. I have put this into a unit on ethics in which we explore the problematic of ends and means (Plato and Aristotle) and the power of language to both construct and destroy. This provides me with a much firmer basis for objecting to your student's kind of rhetoric--it's Nazism, of course. Catherine F. Schryer University of Waterloo PS. the Katz article appeared in College English a couple of years ago.