Though Sommers and Saltz offer no prescriptions about what such intellectually engaging assignments should be, the examples in their article all suggest that—whether or not the writers specifically advert to the self—students consistently chose courses and writing topics, as Freire might predict, related to their existential dilemmas. Over the course of their undergraduate programs, they used their writing to examine, critique, and grapple with high stake personal issues or situations from as many perspectives as possible. Thus, though their selves were not the objects of study per se, students were using their feelings, their embodied responses to issues (Hindman, 2001) as one means, one type of evidence, to interrogate and construct how they wanted to exist—in other words, they were writing deeply personal narratives.

Sommers and Saltz (2004) present a compelling argument for the importance of analytical—and synthetic—writing in all academic disciplines as a means for first year students to “write themselves into a small corner of academia, gradually learning to see themselves … as legitimate members of a college community” (p. 131). Moreover, they demonstrate how writing, which employs many strategic tools to hone a piece of communication, is not the tool itself, as Mike Rose (1985/1997) argues, but “an ability fundamental to academic inquiry, an ability whose development is not fixed but ongoing” (p. 544)—an ability that is learned through apprenticeship to experienced writers who will teach their students the rhetorical skills effective within their disciplines. Consequently, I argue that the study of rhetoric: discovering, interrogating, theorizing, and practicing rhetorical strategies through reading and writing, is the appropriate work of first-year composition classes. The study of rhetoric—the art of communication, as I read Freire, is the means by which to awaken critical consciousness in all first-year students, regardless of the homefront from which they hail.