Before students are able to write fairly original, successful, critical essays on literature, they need to become experienced members of the audience for whom they will write, sharing fully the social context of critical writing by becoming part of an interactive, interpretive community. This reader-response technique appears to be the best critical viewpoint for the freshman composition class to adopt. One way to guide students through this method is to first introduce the reading process, the basics of reader response, and German aesthetic theories. Students then react to literary works on the basis of their own unguided, unfocused, aesthetic reactions to the text. As students discover the elements of the literary work, the critical vocabulary they will need for their own critical essays is then introduced within the contexts of their discussions of the work. Next, students turn to the literary text itself in order to develop and support their viewpoints about that text, giving the text its proper power. As students working in an interpretive community with the literary text before them, they will exchange and confront one another's readings of the text and move from their own experience into the text itself in order to interpret how they all arrive at those meanings. Finally, the "alternative criteria of validity" that students agree upon within their interpretive communities can supply them with the problems they can define and solve in their essays. (Thirteen references are appended.) (MS)