For a specialist from the communication discipline, studying with Alexander Luria, who had been a colleague of Lev Vygotsky in the l920's, provided insights into the Soviet psychologist's ideas about mediation and mind and how writing fits into those ideas. According to Luria, Vygotsky was a methodologist who worried about what kinds of methods could be brought to bear upon theory in a relevant way. The early work of Vygotsky and Luria centered on the concept of artifact mediation which develops in human beings the capacity to "control themselves from the outside." Vygotsky believed that written speech is difficult for the school child because: (1) writing involves an abstraction process; (2) it lacks expression and all aspects of speech that are reflected in sound; (3) written speech is a speech monologue, a conversation with a piece of paper; and (4) written speech requires that children do voluntarily, with effort, what they did effortlessly as younger children. A basic mediation triangle which appears often in Vygotsky's writing provides a device for coming to grips with the literature applying his ideas to college writing. The triangle illustrates that children experience the world in two distinctive ways once they acquire language: directly through their sensory contact with the physical environment and indirectly through language. The largest number of Vygotsky-inspired approaches to writing instruction focus on the "world" side of the mediational triage, but there are also researchers/teachers who pursue the other approaches. (Two figures are included.) (NH)