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Russ: I'd love to claim the reference to audience as "all those folks out there in chairs," but it was Park (first name?), not me. I think, though, that the academic "audience" (still a totally unsatisfactory metaphor for me) is more accurately perceived as a critic in the theatre - a "reader" waiting to find fault. Can we not agree that there are such things as authentic opportunities for reading, more or less, and that the acacdemic reader is simulating such a reading? The closest authentic reading situation I can imagine that "fits" reading student essays is the one we all find ourselves in as working scholars, and the evaluation we deploy against student writing is a measure of how far that writing falls from the writing we experience (or expect) professionally. I should add that I find Russ Hunt's one BIG idea both very persuasive and very big. Anthony Pare.