A writing class is comprised of student writing; that is the focus. But to improve your writing, you need more than practice; you need frameworks of understanding the context of the written communication one is doing. Rhetoric, of course, is the first, the Ur-theory, of strategic invention, arrangement and delivery. Genre and discourse analysis also provide fascinating insights into how words arise from (and impact) social relations. Over the years, I have also drawn on Nonviolent Communication, Pragmatics (e.g. “implicature”) and Sociolinguistics (e.g. “face-threatening acts”) to explain how language arises from and shapes relationships. Finally, I have learned a great deal from reading "old school" literary critics like Kenneth Burke, I. A. Richards and Ann Bertholf, readers who sought to understand how writing involves a "continuing audit of meaning" (aka, reading) and how curious and manifold are the ways "in which a word finds a thought and a thought, a word" (Bertholf).