Composition teachers need to pluralize their notions of what constitutes viable discourse to enrich their own rhetoric and to "listen" more effectively to students' writing, so that their notions of written discourse may come to reflect the rainbow of international influences that exist in the United States. A good first step would be to move beyond the causal, deterministic framework within which composition teachers now view student essay writing toward an "I-Thou" relationship where the student is encountered in the full freedom of her or his otherness. Instead of gazing at student discourse, seeing it as a product to be weighed, marked for what separates it from an ideal concept of "the Paper," and kept or thrown overboard, would it not be more profitable to keep the focus on the student paper-as-Thou--as the expressive extension of the self that Michel de Montaigne's model implies it is? (RS)