A teacher's small group experiences in a graduate seminar in affective teaching techniques provided insights that carried over to a freshman composition course. At the beginning of the semester the 26 seminar members, meeting in one group, concealed their insecurities by bombarding each other with obscurities. Similarly, beginning composition students write in ambiguities to prevent attacks against their ideas; students are also writing "what the teacher wants" and not for a real audience. When the seminar group was split into small discussion groups, participants began to focus on meaningful conversation, and student writing in the composition class began to improve when students were divided into small groups to react to each other's work. Both the seminar members and the freshman writers were helped by the mirror of their audiences to see themselves more clearly. Seminar members also learned to concentrate on each other's contributions and help speakers gain new insights into what they had said. In the freshman class, students began to write for each other. Two students wrote readers' theater scripts for others to read aloud, and one student wrote about her religious customs to enlighten her classmates. The small group experiences helped to create a true writer/audience relationship. (GW)