Readers as well as writers compose meaning. Using the same characteristics essential to effective writing--planning, drafting, aligning, revising, and monitoring--readers react creatively with the text. In response to the author's intention and their own knowledge base, they decide what they want to get from their reading. Constantly renegotiating these goals, readers create successively more refined drafts of meaning, adopting different alignments (critic, coauthor, editor, character, reporter, eye witness) to achieve greater coherence. Finally, after revising their developing interpretations, readers monitor their understanding, evaluating their effectiveness in each stage of the composing process. Involved in multidimensional, multimodal processes, readers do not passively receive meaning but actively create it. (MM)