Raymond William's historical analysis of the "community" and the "individual" is useful for looking critically at the notion of "discourse communities." Recent "social" theories of writing have invoked the idea of community in ways that seem at once sweeping and vague, for they fail to state the operating rules or boundaries of such communities. These theories about the power of social forces in writing are clearly needed in a field that has focused primarily on the writer as an individual, but they do pose some problems. First, they offer a view of academic discourse that is oddly lacking in conflict or change. Second, they present that discourse as almost wholly foreign to many students, raising questions not only about their chances of ever learning to use such an alien tongue, but of why they should do so in the first place. Finally, they tend to polarize talk about writing. One of the most pressing tasks for writing theory is to form what Williams calls a "positive opposing" term for discourse community, one that will allow us to view writers as social individuals--as persons who are not only acted upon by the social discourses of which they are part, but who can act to resist and change the demands of those discourses as well. (Sixteen references are appended.) (MS)