Writing teachers should employ a pragmatic-eclectic approach to help freshman students become acquainted with as many writing models as possible. To privilege one model over the many others is to ignore the student's need for self- and world-discovery. The composition classroom has become the current center of critical reading and thinking skills, and writing teachers need to make the students the center of the writing experience. Composition students should be able to ask and answer, "What in my/the world is going on?" Before student voices become institutionalized, they should experiment with writing groups, discovering what has become known as "modern rhetoric." Students can explore possibilities in the important areas of audience and the nature of literacy, and decide what writing models work for them. However, after their initial experimentation with broader views of process, audience, and literacy, students need to understand the political realities of academic writing: the ability to argue a point--that is, to support a position with research--and the ability to present facts clearly. One important way to help students to adjust to a more prescriptive model is to discuss the narrower views of audience and literacy in academic writing. Another way is to point out that most academic writing always has been collaborative, in which people "talk" through the articles they find in the research process. This point of view introduces students to structures required by other liberal arts courses. (KEH)