This article uses Zak Lancaster's 2016 discovery that academics do not actually write the way "They Say/I Say" says they do to reflect on relations between, on the one hand, facts about academic writing and, on the other, the pedagogical values that underlie and guide those facts--or, put another way, to reflect on how values we may espouse relate to the facts of actual practice. What implications for how we teach Basic Writing follow from the facts of how academics write? I argue that what "follows" is deliberative, not deductive: although value-laden practice may emerge from and relate to certain facts, such practice is not necessarily entailed by those facts. Some discussion of is/ought relations helps explain this argument, i.e., that how things go is not always how they should. This argument also points, then, toward the good that Basic Writing should promote.