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Many practitioners in the writing field tend to think of research skills as logical, analytical, abstracting abilities, not as personal, expressive or imaginative. Even many contemporary literary and composition theorists believe that theory must be divorced from everyday life. According to Richard Rorty, in many intellectual circles, the more irrelevant to human life (and the personal) that theory can stay, the more respectable it will be. However, many theorists today, such as Paulo Freire, Michael Polanyi and Mary Warnock, are forging the way in developing holistic pedagogies that aim to develop the intuitive, poetic, and personal as well as the logical and analytic. "If we think of the imagination as part of intelligence," Warnock points out, "then we must be ready to admit that like the rest of human intelligence, it needs educating." Given these concerns, composition instructors might set the imagination to work by asking students to learn from interpreting varied perceptions of reality; students can profit by engaging in several writing workshop practices: journal writing, writing group process logs, and collaborative and diverse-genre research projects. Those research projects could involve interviews, which allow students to construct meaning while satisfying their natural thirst for experiential learning. (Contains 28 references.) (TB)