Reading Alan’s thoughtful piece rekindled some thoughts and questions of my own about the whole issue of what we call second language writing (SLW) in general and argument in particular. Alan helpfully made reference and comparison to L1 writing in his piece and the first question that came to my mind was, “What is the difference between the teaching of L1 writing and SLW?" Closely linked to this is a related sub-question, “What is the goal of a SLW class”? A second major question is “Who, in the real world, needs to write ‘argumentative’ essays anyway”?