The study of ethos and ethical persuasion has continued from Aristotle through the many cultural ideologies and right on into contemporary scholarship. For instance, rhetoricians such as Michael Hassett study the nature of ethos on writing in postmodern culture. Hassett claims that the "ethical writer" is "a person attempting to write in such a way that the reader is invited into the text's space as a full and equal partner in the meaning-making process" (194). Hassett examines the focus on reading that postmodern theories promoted and claims that the theories have not offered much to the study of writing. In fact, he cites comments that "`those who read texts rather than those who write them must carry the primary responsibility for seeing that writing functions ethically,'" and "the writing of a text is an inherently unethical act that can be made ethical only through the judgment and response of those readers whose common interests it addresses'" (quotes from Gregory Clark in Hassett, 180). Hassett, like me, does not accept these claims at face value. Certainly the role of the reader has and deserves more stature than it was granted in past rhetorics. For Aristotle and Plato, the audience was the equivalent of a set of variables. For later rhetoricians, a rhetor crafted meaning from the word of God, from standards of "Taste," or by addressing the mind's generic faculties. In each of these paradigms, the rhetor was responsible for the entirity of the act of writing, and his readers sought to understand his meaning. From that conception of the writer/reader relationship, criticicism and conceptions of meaning spun, turning on questions like "What is an Author?" and statements proclaiming "The Death of the Author." Until, at some point, the reader--or at least an idealized version of a reader--seemed to be in charge of the meaning of a text. These claims persist and are echoed in many comments about hypertexts.