Teaching always occurs in a rhetorical context. It involves discovering and maintaining a proper balance among three elements at work in any communicative effort: the available arguments about the subject itself, the interests and peculiarities of the audience, and the voice of the speaker. Teacher management of the classroom, writing assignments, and comments on student papers reflect this rhetorical stance. Effective teachers emphasize classroom writing practice over formal lectures. They spend significantly less time talking about writing than other teachers might but plan many more activities that encourage students to plan, draft, and rewrite progressively more complicated pieces. Conscious of student needs, they compose each writing assignment carefully--assessing its relationship to previous work, anticipating possible problems, and planning other material to supplement the assignment. They use marginal comments and endnotes as a written dialogue with students about their writing, a private tutorial that explains not just what to do but how. Concerned with the relationships among students, teachers, and the composing process, the teaching of writing is necessarily a rhetorical art. (MM)