The Wilson Hill Academy composition sequence starts with two guiding principles: teach students to listen and teach students to focus on goals in their writing. In a world rife with unsubstantiated opinion, pausing to heed the apostle James words to be slow to speak and quick to listen takes practice. For this reason, Wilson Hill students begin this practice in grammar school by writing about literature and continue it throughout all their humanities classes. WHA writing assignments fall into two categories: expository argument and imitative creative writing.  Through expository argument students learn to use specific events in literature to support an idea or opinion and avoid circular arguments.  In imitative exercises, students mimic the syntax and diction of great writers and begin the journey of developing their own voice and vocabulary.  At the same time, students learn that an essay has a goal, the parts of an essay have goals, a paragraph has a goal, a sentence has a goal, and every word even has a goal. The writing process is simplified as students focus on accomplishing these goals using their expanding repertoire of writing tools.  In this way, students also obtain the ability to scale their writing from a one-paragraph response to a lengthy senior thesis based on the needs of the prompt.