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Oh, I said, glancing around the four-person office. Why had he needed to use the couch when there were chairs for the students right in front of each desk? Silently, I resolved to rid myself of it as soon as my successor departed. As it turned out, getting rid of the couch wasn't easy, so I simply disassociated myself from it. I shoved it further along the wall toward an officemate's work area and set up shop. When the semester began, I found I was perfectly comfortable conferring with students from behind my desk. The couch went unused for two years until our department's move across campus finally gave me the opportunity to get rid of it altogether. Unwanted furniture, we professors were told, could be abandoned in our old offices. Happily, I left the ugly thing where I had shoved it and looked forward to a couchless office in our new building. But strange to say, I installed a couch in my new office only months after I moved into it. My reason for doing so had something to do with a change in my attitude toward teaching writing-a change prompted in part by a writing surgeon named Richard Selzer. The connection between surgery and writing is one that Selzer makes often. In a lecture presented recently at our campus, he spoke of the similarity of the tools used in the two arts: the scalpel and the pen. Both mark their passage across a surface with a thin line of color. Both are used with the intention of exposing something to view. Here the parallel ends, for the surgeon uses the