The importance of direct explicit instruction in secondary schools has been shown to improve student learning outcomes across the curriculum. The question then becomes one of whether adapting direct explicit instruction in post-secondary institutions would have the same impact on student grades. Graham and Perin (2007) identified eleven elements of effective writing strategies in their meta-analysis of writing instruction. This paper seeks to determine how the difference in the two writing environments, secondary and post-secondary, would affect their implementation. It will also look at the differences between the two groups of students, who are very close in age but very far apart in terms of expectations, to see how those different expectations affect the students' ability to acquire and use Graham and Perin's (2007) writing strategies