The cognitivist view of composition suggests that if students are supplied with a set of writing strategies, they will learn to think in more complex and powerful ways, observing their own ideas and writing from another person's viewpoint. On the other hand, some social critics argue that composition teachers need to help their students enter into a new sort of discourse--one that "invents the university...to try on the peculiar ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding, and arguing that define the discourse of our community" (Bartholomae). In her book, "Problem-Solving Strategies for Writing," Linda Flower offers two examples of student writing--the first one termed egocentric and writer-based and the other firm and authoritative. The second example, advanced as better from a reader or professor's viewpoint, in fact shows the writer being socialized and appropriated by the academy. Flower's use of the word "egocentric" for the first example is dismissive, implying that the writer has failed to master the rudiments of ordinary adult discourse, when the real problem is how to enter into a discourse whose constraints and phrasings are unfamiliar to her. Flower's reader-based prose is really another name for a privileged form of discourse: hierarchical in structure, organized around concepts rather than events, and whose transitions and conclusions are made strongly explicit. What is needed instead is a way of talking about writing that does not turn into yet another language of exclusion but rather allows students to connect their discourses to others'. (NKA)