The thoughts below meander a bit. They're mostly aimed at those who teach First-year Composition, but may be useful to instructors in other disciplines. I was inspired to cast this bit of prose out into the blogosphere by the realization that the writers I saw in class were not the writers who were composing many of the papers I was reading. No, I'm not talking about plagiarism. What I mean is that I have come to see something of a split consciousness apparent in many of my students' approaches to writing.