Noting that teaching the research paper seldom gets below surface conventions, this book surveys the work of key theorists in rhetoric, past and present, and seeks to change the way teachers and students think about the relationship between writers and readers. Focusing on theorists who see the creation of knowledge as a social process, the book discusses reader response and discourse processing theories and develops a model of how an individual evolves a set of beliefs about the world. Chapters of the book are: (1) Starting Points; (2) Reading as Construction; Reading as Communication; (3) From Interpretation to Belief; (4) The Rhetoric of Reading as a Critical Technique; and (5) Implications for Teaching and for the Art of Rhetoric. Each chapter includes footnotes, and a five-page bibliography is attached. (NKA)