Although claimed as the province of special student populations, such as the victims of domestic abuse about whom I write, Sommers and Saltz (2004) intimate in reporting about Harvard University first-year students, that this attitude of self-defensiveness, of feeling like a “displaced person, … the admissions committee’s one mistake” (p. 125), appears ubiquitous among first year students. From their four-years of data collected on cross-disciplinary undergraduate writing by one cohort of Harvard students, Sommers and Saltz argue that the first year of college and the writing that students do during the first year are crucial to students relinquishing their defensive stance. They argue further that these students help their own growth as writers by learning to see themselves not as “fixer-uppers” (my term) but rather as novice writers (open to new experience) expressing themselves as experts (agents capable of reading complex texts and responding with ideas articulating a pattern they discerned)—in other words, by being novice writers “writing into expertise” (p. 134). In addition, these scholars suggest that faculty can do much to foster students’ growth as writers by

designing and orchestrating these [best writing] experiences, whether by creating interesting assignments, mentoring through feedback, or simply moving aside and giving students freedom to discover what matters to them. The paradigm shift [to seeing writing as a transaction, an exchange in which they can “get and give”] is more likely to occur when faculty treat freshmen as apprentice scholars, giving them real intellectual tasks that allow them to bring their interests into a course. (pp. 140, 139)