Because the classroom—whether in the university setting or a community setting such as the Center for Nonviolence—is a site where students with histories of trauma may be subjected to additional shame by well-intentioned but inadequately prepared co-learners (including the teacher), I cannot advocate memoir writing assignments for novice writers. As Received and Subjective Knowers, which trauma survivors as first-year writers often are, novice writers do not quite have the capacity to separate what they have written from who they are (Belenky et al., 1986). Having no or few experiences with college-level academic discourse, few first-year students can yet comprehend the implicit and explicit demands of academic writing, nor can they understand that the teachers, who care very much about them as individuals, have, as Lester Faigley points out (as cited in Payne, 2000), the institutional power and responsibility to grade student writing according to standards their trauma narrative may not yet meet. Therefore, while writing a compelling, well-developed, structurally and grammatically effective trauma narrative for a personal audience is daunting emotionally and cognitively, writing this same narrative for an academic audience presents a situation with the high probability for failure and public humiliation.