Music education is uniquely suited to reinforce several basic skills that are part of the overall reading and writing processes of students. These skills include freedom of expression and the fluency of ideas, identifying a composer's purpose and message, and reasoning and comprehension. Musicians should develop the habit of using journals for capturing responses to music heard and first attempts at composing, as well as for including other written material about music. A good exercise once or twice in a course is to have students review their journal entries and write a longer entry in which they either try to trace some theme that runs through their material or chart their progress and explain what they have discovered about themselves as listeners as well as musicians. A directed reading activity is one technique, for introducing reading material, that will result in improved student attitudes and comprehension. Students do a prereading that sets a purpose for the reading, a prompted reading to foster reader response, and a postreading that provides reinforcement of comprehension. Finally, students can show their level of understanding by applying what they have learned in a musical activity. (SRT)