One way to elicit good writing from students is to expose them to great literature and have them write about the attributes they share with a character, or about the experiences they have had that parallel those in a work of fiction, or about how a work of fiction compares with real "life." Using James Joyce's "Dubliners" as a primary source, students chose four related episodes that had made an impression on them and then wrote a separate and different kind of response for each episode, developing their own response techniques. The teacher wrote along with them, explaining the purpose of introductions, transitions, and synthesizing statements or theses. The students also read and wrote about Plato by writing dialogues of their own and using techniques borrowed from Gestalt psychology to dramatize and analyze conflict. In this way, students put themselves "inside" an issue and were forced to look at it from all angles. To learn to use outside sources, the students chose the five ideas they considered most significant in the dialogues, and wrote a summary of each followed by two or three original illustrations that could not come from their own experiences. Although these techniques are innovative, the students were taught the conventions of academic language while being encouraged to retain the idiomatic speech in which they were brought up. (SRT)