I think the two most popular text effect tutorials for any design program is how to create plastic or chrome looking text. Well, in this tutorial for Illustrator CS2, we'll be tackling the first mentioned - plastic text!

1. Type out some text. The larger and bolder the text - the better it's going to look.

2. In this particular font style the characters are a little farther apart than I would like for this effect so I'll move them closer together. To do this go to Window > Type > Character to open up the Character window, if it isn't already.

In order to move the letters closer together, I'll change the Tracking (highlighted below) to -35.

This is how the text looks at this step:

3. In order to create the plastic text style I need to fill the text with a gradient fill. However, to do this I'll need to convert the type into, what Illustrator calls, Outlines.  So go to Type > Create Outlines (make sure you have the text selected).

Once, we've converted our text, it is no longer editable with the text tools so make sure everything is spelled right before creating Outlines!

4. To fill the letters with the gradient, open up the Gradient Panel and select Linear. This fills each individual letter with a linear gradient. However, this direction is going from left to right and we need to change it to top to bottom so...

...select the Gradient Tool.

Change the direction of the fill by holding down the mouse button over just the top of the text and drag down to make a vertical line. You should see a line indicating the fill direction.

You should end up with something like this. Basically, you just want the darker gradient towards the bottom. 

5. Ok, the next couple of steps are easy ones! Add an Inner Glow to the text with the settings shown below.

Now, add an Outer Glow.

At this stage your text should look somewhat "plastic" already but to really make the effect stand out - we'll add a highlight.

6. Draw an Oval over the top half of the text. It should already have the same fill settings as the text but if it doesn't make it the same linear gradient.

Select the text and make a copy of it. The reason will be obvious in a second!

Select the original text and the oval shape and in the Pathfinder window click the "Intersect shape" button. 

What you should have left is just the top half of the text - that's exactly what we want!  This will be the highlight.

Move this over the copied text and change the Opacity of the highlight to Screen and we're done!