A treatise on factors that need to be identified and addressed in helping adult South-Asian students to enhance their confidence and improve their performance in writing. This is an area of increasing importance as higher education in these countries becomes more and more research oriented. Weaknesses in language exist-and persist--the unhappy legacy of poor educational policies, miniscule budgets and half-hearted implementation over the years. Remediation is said to be the most difficult and least successful undertaking in language teaching, but it might be possible to improve approaches and results by looking at some of the facts and factors of the situation