Empiricists may be defined as naive fumblers, people who collect and analyze data in the absence of a guiding theory. A theory may be defined as an empirically verifiable explanation of phenomena that predicts behavior. Empirical research may be defined as scholarship that is public and is performed using entities measured in units that can be agreed upon and reproduced. Thus, those who do empirical research must be both well-versed in theory and creative in their designs. Traditional English studies do not provide preparation for doing the theoretical and empirical studies required for charting students' production and comprehension processes or teachers' evaluation processes. The difficulty is that, without an underlying theory, it is not possible to understand the results of research. One result has been that in testing evaluators of writing, important variables have been missed such as the interaction of the reader with the text. Using an interactive theory, at least one researcher has developed some important basic insights into reading and evaluation. (TJ)