The author has been tutoring and teaching writing for fifteen years, but has discovered that few people outside of academia know what it is that she does. Despite the rise in composition graduate programs and the improving market for composition specialists, even within the university, faculty from other disciplines frequently have vague notions of her marking essays with red ink; a few seem to imagine her work as a series of punctuation drills. In an effort to locate just ways of defining herself as a compositionist, the author explores some of the most commonplace understandings of what a teacher of freshman writing is. Among the many identities assigned to her by others, she counts: grammarian, assessment coach and arbiter of academic discourse. In this article, the author will briefly explore each of these identities as she works to comprehend how they may guide or misguide her teaching. Her intention is not to offer a panacea or to suggest that all writing teachers adopt her perspective on identity. Instead, she wishes to share where her personal research and reflection have led her.