First year composition courses are often expected to cure students of all their writing woes. John Warner addresses this false assumption by examining why students’ writing often falters outside the first year composition classroom. Not only are students often underprepared and still learning content material, but they do not grasp the requirements of different genres and rhetorical situations. Even when armed with an understanding of rhetorical questions to consider when writing, students often struggle to apply these to a new field of study.