This paper discusses the dynamics of Paulo Freire's "true perception" and the importance of language awareness, and even style, to that "interdependence" which makes possible the perception and transformation of reality. Freire calls for a critical intervention to transform reality, and because this intervention simultaneously incorporates subjective and objective experience, it is necessarily an awareness of language. Several concepts from British critical linguistics, "gap filling" and "inferencing," are helpful in understanding and employing liberatory critical interventions in advanced and regular composition classes. In Freire's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" (1968), the critical intervention is the activity that brings forth consciousness: a subject is born when its object is changed. Critical linguistics, as Lester Faigley (1992) argues, has been better than most perspectives at facilitating an appreciation of an ambiguous, double sense of agency, an interdependence of actor and acted upon. The first step in a modern tradition of stylistic analysis is the perception of a "dominant feature" in the text. In the critical linguistics classroom, the instructor aims to induce an awareness of style by giving students the purposefully vague direction to "identify 'THE' outstanding feature" in an excerpt of their own choosing. Then, the instructor asks the students to find a gap in the text and write a detailed "ghost chapter" to fill it. Finally, inferencing goes beyond gap filling: it examines the zone of "background intuition" that Freire mentions--it calls on the set of assumptions and expectations framed in common sense. (Contains 17 references.) (TB)