Today's educators face the challenge put forth in the Common Core Standards (CCS) of designing instruction through which students will become college and career ready. A major element in that readiness is the ability to write well. However, the voices of student writers have been absent from the scholarship on which data-driven, best practices in writing curriculum and instruction can be based. Thus, Dr. Bompiani-Smith set out to understand the essence of students' lived experiences within the academic writing process in order to affect improvements within teacher practice. Seven study participants shared their experiences with the academic writing process, ultimately supporting Graves's (1983) tenet that students come to school with writing processes already in place and that teachers should focus on working with, instead of against, those processes. The overriding implication of the study is that if teachers want to encourage students to be successful academic writers and to meet the CCS for college and career readiness, then students must be given greater autonomy in how they implement the writing process so that their personal writing processes are validated.