> Americans think it is the most natural thing in the world. By and large, they do not. (Where did you go to high school? I'd like to send my kid there, if tha

> Americans think it is the most natural thing in the world. By and large, they do not. (Where did you go to high school? I'd like to send my kid there, if that's true to your experience.) Argumentative essays seemed just as "artifical [and] weird" to the vast majority of the native English-speaking American college freshmen I taught as they did to the author's Chinese students. We can speculate about the reasons for that, if we like. The cohort who (in my experience) were best-prepared for that style of writing / thinking were German ~16-year-old ESL students coming from their gymnasia system. Those kids were a delight, and really kept me on my toes.