well as the kinds of writing asked of them in college composition courses. I would also suggest that students struggle to produce the more self-expressive writing that represents the other side of this debate, particularly if we held that kind of writing to any quality standard. So we can agree on the problem, but we probably can't agree on what causes the problem. Texting? Bored students? Angry gods? Burned-out teachers? Economics? Rigid institutions and policies? All of the above? None of the above? I suppose the first question we should ask is why we want students to produce this particular kind of writing and why we establish the particular standards that we have? The answer to the first question is more crucial, and I believe we teach a kind of writing that we imagine as a general, foundational kind of argumentation. This imagined foundation spawns from our observation (reading) of many different kinds of texts and our discovery of these common attributes in our reading. But to me this is like the geocentric model. The ability to describe and even predict textual features bears no necessarily relation to the ontology of those texts or the process by which they were composed. The standards then follow upon this intellectual error and constitute what we describe as these general features of argumentative writing. But our descriptions of argument rest upon ontological assumptions that arise from Enlightenment thinking about humans and language. Personally I would suggest that one is better of sacrificing a