Teaching composition at a college level requires students to reexamine issues that they will soon wrestle with as new adults, as voters and consumers and citizens and practitioners of world religions and windsurfers and gamblers, through writing.

Through writing, in our case academic writing, students are pushed to not only think, but explain the logic behind their beliefs. They thus become better aware of how their ideas function, or more interestingly, discover the holes in the logic behind their beliefs, and revise them.

They will (hopefully) become more articulate, but also more curious. If nothing else, they will learn more about themselves and the way others think about the same societal issues. The gamblers will learn something from the Buddhists and the Buddhists will learn something from the windsurfers.