Writing does more than demonstrate the interpretive process active in the mind of a student, it influences and directs the interpretive process in writing. Writing to read allows the expressive dimension to find an overt, secure place in the interpretive framework of a student's learning. By examining a student's theoretical explanation of her response to Andrea Lee's "Sarah Phillips," a short novel about a young black woman growing up in the 1970s, this process is clearly revealed. The student's marginal comments, reflections, and drafts changed the way the student saw her own responses to the text by helping her to find the "speculative instruments" with which to name her developing interpretations. In this way, writing can transform reading by making it a conscious symbolic process of discovering strategies and forms. As readers confront experience in texts, they exercise the primary act of mind by symbolizing it--writing illustrates and contributes to the transformational character of that symbolization. Standing alone, neither reading to write nor writing to read completes this creative process of interpretation. Teachers should nurture the interconnectedness of reading and writing with their responses to students' works, illustrating and modeling this symbiosis with responses focusing on interpretation rather than structure. (MM)