Story of a Writing Class

What I have to offer is language and just a bit of experience. Now, what kind of language, and what kind of experience, is up for hot debate among writing teachers. My question is: What is the story we want our students to tell about their university writing classes as they move off into their lives? Do we want them to tell the story that writing is merely a means to win arguments, to jab and slice opponents? To dupe consumers with fancy, psychological innuendo so that they buy products? To see language and thinking as a kind of intellectual math problem of situations, audience, and purpose? Or do we want them to see writing as means to common ground, to better self-critical awareness? A means to better pay attention, find compassion, understanding, empathy? Do we want them to say "That writing class changed my life?" Do we want them to say "I know myself better than I did before, and I used writing to figure that out?" Do we want them to say "That class made a writer out of me?" Or is it a bit of both poetics and rhetoric? Whatever it is, their story will be a creation composed by the language we use and how students use that language to compose relationships between themselves and written presentation and expression. Oh, the stories they might tell.