peaking always depends on a previous history of speaking but also on fresh initiative and uptake. The speaker-hearer collaboration requires agreement on the timeliness, purpose, and format of the speaker’s guidance in addition to a shared understanding of language. Our ordinary powers of organizing communication and performing the Austinian functions of stating content, illocutionarily positioning interlocutors, and occasioning foreseeable effects by speaking imply general standards of truthful, collegial, and helpful speech. Standards of ordinarily acceptable speech remain in force when the ordinary powers of speech are amplified in extraordinarily powerful artistic, magical, political, religious, legal, and scientific modes of speech, as the danger of going wrong in speech by warping the guidance relationship is inescapable. Although the most important elements of literate communication belong to the powers of speech as such, writing and reading will make themselves indispensable for critical clarification of the basis on which extraordinary linguistic guidance is offered and followed.