Content area writers need a method of operating that integrates the ways of science but without using the proofs used by specialists. Two concepts from the New Rhetoric--S. Toulmin's "warrants" and C. Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca's "universal audience"--might enable English professors to serve a regulative or balancing function as they develop writing across the curriculum programs. If writing teachers in any discipline were to base assignments on the idea that part of the students' job would be to search out and understand the warrants behind the method of inquiry in their disciplines, then writing might become a way of learning the discipline's values and methods as well as of imitating the surface of the discourse produced. This leads to the contention that the concept of universal audience must lie behind any argument, no matter how specific the particular audience to which the argument is addressed. This universal audience assents to the way a writer validates an experience or idea. The dialectic between universal and particular audience is necessary for the writer to create a rhetorical context. The concepts of warrants and universal audience will give English teachers the strategies they need to provide the perspectives on texts that will assure both the rigor and breadth required of good writing. (NKA)