By building up the confidence of student writers, writing teachers hope to reduce the hostility and anxiety so often found in authoritarian introductory college composition classes. Process oriented writing theory implicitly defines confidence as a wholly personal quality resulting from students' discovery that they do have "something to say" to readers. However, the social dimension of the writing act is lost in such a formulation. The text's authority derives from the writer's imagination, but it does so because the writers have a privileged relationship with the world, a relationship that gives them access to and influence with an audience. But this does not hold true for student writers in writing classrooms, where students consider the teacher the owner of their writing. Writing teachers wish the students to be creative but within the limits of a specified writing assignment, due date, and topic. The current crop of writing textbooks adds to the conflict by either glorifying the ability to write or by reducing it to a physical skill anyone can learn (like skiing). Peer group revision, journal writing, portfolios of student writing samples, and revision after turning in the paper are all methods that build personal confidence and social authority--all help dilute the concentration of authority in the teacher and give students a stake in what goes on both in the classroom and in their own writing. (NKA)