By revealing the scaffold of rhetroical choices beneath any piece of writing, this reader equips the student with techniques for evaluating and responding to all types of writing and for making similar choices in their own writing. Conversations in Context invites students into the community of academic writers by introducing them to central conversations on student identities, the aims of the university, and the conventions of academic writing. The text’s conversational arrangement allows students to critically examine the intertextual subtleties of discussions in which writers agree with, disagree with, build upon, exemplify, and explain each other’s ideas.