Abstract
Teachers of writing regularly face the task of advising students about their work-in-progress. The task is problematic because it raises many practical and theoretical issues. Not least is the ethical issue of rights and responsibilities with respect to texts. Researchers recommend that a teacher must somehow make it possible for students to take control of their own writing. A responsible teacher, then, would be a responsive reader, one who helps students identify and solve writing problems but, in the course of suggesting how they might do so, avoids unwittingly appropriating the draft. Responsible students would, in turn, be their own best readers, taking responsibility for solving writing problems of their own making. Therefore, among the many important questions faced by teachers and raised by researchers is how to make comments that respect the differences between a teacher's and a student's responsibility to an emerging text.