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Students can start to appreciate this new way of knowing once they see how academic writing typically asks writers to join a conversation rather than to report information. Writers typically try to change their readers' view about something through analysis or argument. The conversation itself is rooted in a problem or question—often of a disciplinary nature—shared by the writer's targeted audience. The writer's own contribution should bring something new to the conversation. It springs from the writer's own critical thinking brought to bear on evidence relevant to the problem with awareness of counter‐evidence and alternative claims occasioned by different theoretical or methodological approaches.

However, as William Perry (1970) has shown in his classic study of students' cognitive growth through college, most of our students do not come to college seeing the world this way. Perry shows that most beginning college students view education dualistically, imagining knowledge as the acquisition of correct information and right answers. They see themselves as empty buckets being filled with data by their professors. To dualists, the only academic use of writing is to demonstrate one's knowledge of the correct facts—a concept of writing as information rather than as argument or analysis. Students in Perry's middle stages of multiplicity are beginning to accept the notion of opposing views, but they see these simply as “opinions”; because “everyone has a right to his or her own opinion,” they see little purpose in defending any particular view and thus are not compelled through the process of rigorous thinking that intellectually mature writing demands. It is not until they reach Perry's highest stages of development that a real need for reasoned argument begins to emerge.

A limitation of Perry's study is that he only traced the cognitive growth of male students. In their classic book Women's Ways of Knowing, Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, and Tarule (1986) add additional dimensions to Perry's scheme that account for women's experiences and ways of knowing. Belenky et al. describe early stages of female students feeling “silenced” by “received knowledge” presented as absolute truths from infallible authorities. Whereas Perry's students aligned themselves with authority in the dualistic stage, women in Belenky et al.'s study felt silenced and alienated by received knowledge. In later stages, Belenky et al. emphasize forms of thinking that rely not just on adversarial, critical analysis but on “connected knowing,” which involves understanding and empathizing with multiple perspectives in ongoing conversations.

What our beginning college students do not understand, therefore, is the dialogic view of academic life implied by writing across the curriculum. Within this view writing means joining a conversation of persons who are jointly seeking answers to shared questions—a discourse community. These readers and writers are interested in each other's ideas but also, in important ways, skeptical of them. Readers need to be persuaded by appropriate disciplinary uses of reasons and evidence. This view of academic writing implies an uncomfortable view of knowledge as dialogic, contingent, ambiguous, and tentative.

It follows that teaching academic writing means teaching students an unfamiliar way of looking at their courses and at knowledge itself. For a brief glimpse of a student being initiated into this uncomfortable world, consider for a moment the following transcript of a writing center conference in which the student had been asked to argue whether U.S. involvement in Central America in the last part of the twentieth century constituted imperialism.

Tutor: If I said, “Tell me whether or not this is imperialism,” what's your first gut reaction?

Writer: There are very strong arguments for both. It's all in how you define it.

Tutor: Okay, who's doing the defining?

Writer: Anybody. That's just it—there's no real clear definition. Over time, it's been distorted. I mean, before, imperialism used to be like the British who go in and take Hong Kong, set up their own little thing that's their own British government. That's true imperialism. But the definition's been expanded to include indirect control by other means, and what exactly that is I guess you have to decide. So I don't know. I don't think we really have control in Central America, so that part of me says no, that's not imperialism. But other parts of me say we really do control a lot of what is going on in Central America by the amount of dollars and where we put them. So in that sense, we do have imperialism … So the other big question on that, and why I brought in the balance of power, is, where are we allowed to cross the line and where are we not?

Tutor: Okay then, if you're going to ask that question—where are we allowed to cross the line?—it implies that a line is drawn. So what I guess I'm trying to get you to say is [pause]

Writer: Whether I'm for or against.

Tutor: Yes!

Writer: The reason why I'm undecided is because I couldn't create a strong enough argument for either side. There are too many holes in each side. If I were to pick one side, somebody could blow me out of the water.

The student writer, obviously engaged with the assignment, is keenly aware of the tentativeness of different positions, each of which can be “blown out of the water” by an alternative view. Both the facts of the case and, more troublingly, the definition of imperialism are open‐ended problems. The student longs for a “right answer,” resisting the frightening prospect of having to make meanings and defend them. Good writing assignments often produce this kind of discomfort: the need to join, in a reasoned way, a conversation of differing voices.

We thus need to help our students see that academic writing involves intellectual and often emotional struggle. The struggle is rooted in the writer's awareness that a problem exists—often dimly felt, unclarified, and blurry—and that the writer must offer a tentative, risky proposition in response to that problem, a proposition that competes for readers' allegiance with other differing propositions.