It’s often supposed that a work of literature is self-evidently moral and has a will-to-truth. In this chapter, I discuss the extent to which discourses are also true and/or exhibit a pragmatically useful or relevant purpose and raise the issue of whether this ought to be a concern of the discourse analyst. Amongst the issues that arise are the extent to which authorship and readership are presumptive contexts or are constructed by discourse, the extent to which a discourse can or should be relevantly evaluated in relation to another discourse or to some aspect of the physical world, whether the analysis of discourse should also contribute to our understanding of identified categories such as writer, child, etc. and the responsibilities of those who promote expertise in the use of exclusive genres.