This project was born out of my preoccupation with my students' struggle to articulate their ideas at the sentence level. After being assigned an English 102 Honors class, I realized that although the sentences of these advanced writers were grammatically correct, they were stylistically problematic because they were often obscure and evasive instead of precise and to the point. When the students resisted my request for clarity, I decided to conduct semi-structured interviews with each of them in order to better understand the motivations behind their stylistic choices. In this paper I analyze the interviews in the context of composition scholarship that has examined the style of academic discourse in order to determine what the interviews reveal about how this group of first-year writers tried to negotiate the stylistic requirements of academic writing.