This author asserts that college English should provide students with certain communicative skills that enable them to analyze rhetorical effect and produce rhetorically effective texts, including those to be read, those to be viewed as images, those to be heard, and those not to be heard. Recently, new books on visual rhetoric, the rhetoric of silence, and the rhetoric of listening have joined guides to analysis and production of printed texts. This trend signals increasing recognition of the need to teach nondiscursive communication skills, rather than teaching only texts or authors. If college English is seen as the final preparation for communication in the world beyond college, students need to be taught the value implications of standard American written English. College English should sensitize writers and speakers to the cultural implications of the communicative choices people make. Passages on the same subject written in different dialects of English can be used to prompt revealing discussions of appropriate modes and means of conveying an idea.