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I'm sure Elza Tiner is quite right to see five parties -- initial researchers/editors, in-house editors, external readers, funding agencies, and publishers -- as being the collective shapers of our present situation, and to see the relation between the first three of these and the last two as being fundamentally rhetorical. As we are all obviously concerned with getting our research published, we can't ignore such a formulation. But at the risk of becoming tiresome I want to repeat my earlier question: what kind of standards might the people in the first three of these five categories set for themselves if the fourth and fifth categories were for the moment left out of the equation? Do the people in those first three categories -- We Three -- have a set of standards, or several sets of standards, that we can articulate and defend as our very own, apart from the ones imposed on us by funding agencies and publishers? Or have the funders and publishers become so much a part of our scholarly construct that, like victims of the Stockholm Syndrome, we've allowed their scenario to shape our own? I'd hope we can discuss the kinds of important theoretical issues James Cummings has raised precisely because they are important theoretical issues; though my actual work may be constrained by my publisher's contract, my vision of my discipline and its proper parameters certainly should not be. _______________________________________________________________________ William Ingram, English Dept, Univ of Michigan, Ann Arbor MI 48109-1045 e-mail: [log in to unmask] fax (departmental): 313 763 3128 -----------------------------------------------------------------------