in the student's hands, Elbow's approach the teaching of writing appears be revolutionary and freeing. Using such techniques as freewriting, open-ended writing, and other forms of private writing, Elbow encourages students tap their own experience as a source for their writing and elevates the student's own resources over those of the academic community. Elbow's focus on the psychological and physical drives of the writer, the desire be loved (Sharing and Responding) and the compulsion write (Embracing 73), makes writing something that the teacher can share, but apparently not control or appropriate. Recently, however, composition theorists have been critical of the conservative political implications of Elbow's pedagogy, arguing that Elbow's rhetoric, defined variously as Romantic expressivism or expressionistic, fails empower students effect change through language. These critics argue that Elbow's theory hides the social of language (Faigley 531) and teaches students how to assert a private vision, a vision which, despite its uniqueness, finally represents humankind's best nature (Berlin 487). Notably though, those who criticize Elbow for being antisocial focus only on what Elbow has say about writers and writing. In doing so, they overlook what Elbow has say about the most social aspect of writing-the role of the reader and the exchange between writer and reader. In this essay I will examine Elbow's rhetoric of reading in order suggest that these taxonomic critiques oversimplify his theoretical and pedagogical position within the field of composition studies. In fact, a closer examination of Elbow's rhetoric of reading reveals that the problem is not so much that he ignores the social, it's that he tries control it. Like those who criticize him, Elbow would like help students demystify the social processes of the Academy, balance the power between writer and reader within the social space of the composition classroom. In his attempt control the transaction between writer and reader, however, Elbow reproduces the same hierarchy he wishes dismantle. I will suggest, nonetheless, that there is a means by which the more liberating aspects of Elbow's rhetoric of reading might be kept intact.