In teaching composition and writing to students, the author focuses on personal experience, that is, writing out that experience. "Since a writer has something to say only when they have some personal knowledge of their subject, and some real feelings about it, personal experience is uniquely appropriate as subject material." The challenge is to treat this as a subject with "more than private meaning". [ix] It is this sense of a writer's responsibility to their readers that all writing courses seek to teach--the human transaction between author and audience. The term for the relationship is "tone". This is a metaphor from "tone of voice", the inflection that can make the same words either friendly or sneering. Writers must understand the tone of their own.

In the first of three sections, the author as teacher deals with descriptions of an adult as seen by writers when they were children. Second section, writers concerned with their readers as in school, for example, "Jules Henry asks what is really being learned while the grade school teacher thinks she is teaching music". [xi] Third section, where the writer-reader relationship becomes central. "Readers are always about to ask why they should spend their time hearing about someone else's life, opinions or research." [xi] "Mary McCarthy impolies that we should attend to a petty incident of child abuse because that incident will tell us something about concentration camps and tyranny; James Joyce asks us to value a child's tears over a closed carnival because these tears help us see the meaning of growing up in an environment hostile to the imagination." [xii]

Writing and ReWriting. "Tone is more often discovered that planned." [xii] Choose words which express your attitudes; these choices, emerging from subconscious intention generally define emotions, responses, and assumptions previously left unstated and dimly discerned. Organization becomes more clear as you understand what you have to say and why it is important.

explores the writer's relationship to the subject and audience through examples of short stories and essays. The assumption being that this then helps the writer make decisions about diction, syntax, rhythm, metaphor, point of view etc ( )