I teach more first-year students than anything else here at SDSU. It's kind of nice, really. They're excited to be here, optimistic, idealistic. And then the semester starts and they get to see what college writing is about. In high school, they wrote a lot of argument papers, papers that allowed them to give their opinion, to support it with evidence and, well, other opinions. (Really, that's the kind of evidence they give me at the beginning. You might remember what it was like to be a first-year student.) And then I let them know: This is an analytical paper. You can have an opinion, I want you to have an opinion, but it doesn't belong in this paper. And that's hard. Even when they finally get to create an argument paper, it's not really about their opinions; it's about the conclusions they can draw from the evidence, which may or may not align with their opinion. Amy Devitt says that when we take up a genre, we subconsciously take up the va