There is often a resistance to verbal language in the nonverbal arts. Within educational establishments, language does not simply serve the art work or its making; it serves other extraneous goals of legitimation. The link between language and legitimation is striking. Dance education in Great Britain, for example, has recently moved from specialist training schools to institutions of higher education, so that an advanced education in Dance now involves showing comparability with degree level work in other subjects such as, say, English or history. The vehicle by which this comparability is achieved is verbal language in certain institutionalized forms--most notably the essay form. The use of language as a vehicle for normative assessment tends to color the way language as a whole is thought about. In this article, the author argues that language should have an enhanced role in the arts. She discusses how essay writing is taken as conforming to certain notions of what language is and does and suggests that essay might be seen as a form that can be made, rather than as a form that represents meaning. (Contains 34 notes.)