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The other day several students came into the writing centre for help with an assignment that, among other things, asked them to "state the apparant meaning" of the following passage: It is not, in constitutional countries, to be thought that the government, whether completely responsible to the people or not, will often attempt to control the expression of opinion, except when in doing so it makes itself an instrument of the general intolerance of the public. Let us suppose, therefore, that the government is entirely at one with the people, and never thinks of exerting any power of coersion unless in agreement with what it believes to be their voice. But I deny the right of the people to exercise such coercion, either by themselves or by their government. The power itself is illegitimate. (J. S. Mill, 1859) The class was a senior interdisciplinary studies class, but naturally some of the students were flummoxed at the basic decoding level. So were the Writing Centre instructors, and so was I when this came to my attention. After some castigating of context-free decoding assignments etc., we were still left with the problem of how to help students with such reading comprehension tasks. We had a lot of Inkshed-style masochistic fun watching ourselves as we communally figured out what it meant, and compiled a list of common-sense ideas: eliminating restrictives and then putting them back, following equivalence chains, looking at following sentences to see what light they cast on earlier ones, referring to prior knowledge (what _would_ J. S. Mill likely say about this subject...?) etc. Probably the best advice we came up with was the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe advice: "Don't Panic." Probably many student never got past the first sentence and went on to the somewhat more straightforward sentences that followed. However, we want to get our hands on some theoretical background that might help with this. Most of the reading comprehension material I am familiar with is either aimed at lower grades or looks at global issues of reading meaning into long passages (schema theory etc.). I am not aware of much that addresses the fundamental problem of 20th century students decoding the "surface meaning" (whatever that is) of relatively convoluted 19th century, or any century, prose. Any ideas on a theoretical take on this problem? Doug Brent