This discussion delineates five criteria for judging the usefulness of linguistic and psycholinguistic theories. To be of value, a theory must suggest ways of teaching and evaluating language use, it must account both for the meaning of sentences in context and for meaning generated by the relationship between sentences in text, it must allow for the influence of genre on written and spoken prose, it must account for both reading and writing, and it must adopt psychologically valid units of analysis. These criteria are met by the work of cognitive psychologist Walter Kintsch; the usefulness of Kintsch's theory is illustrated through its application to a selection of advertising and news-story text. (KS)