Basic writing instruction often perpetuates an autonomous model of literacy that separates writing and reading from the contexts in which they are situated. This model fails to help students familiarize themselves with the culture of the "academic community." To make this case, the authors analyzed basic writing research, conducted interviews with basic writing students, and studied the portrayal of "remedial" writing in mainstream media. The authors find that basic writers and basic writing are portrayed as violating a narrative in which mastering autonomous literacy strategies is a key element. Basic writing programs are portrayed as successful when they successfully place students within the narrative. The authors suggest new curricular strategies for basic writing classes and new terms for conversations about basic writing, arguing that these will help writers and others to develop connections between writing and culture and will make basic writing a political act.
Basic writing students should be immersed in academic discourse so that they can begin to appropriate it for their own ends. Bartholomae contends that basic writing studies should not center simply on error. Instead, we must better understand how basic writers' lack of understanding about constructions of authority and the rules of academic discourse put them at a disadvantage in an arena that values such knowledge. As a result, Bartholomae argues that the basic writer "has to invent the university by assembling and mimicking its language" (135), often long before the skills of writing in an academic setting are learned. Drawing from scholars such as Linda Flower, John Hayes, and Patricia Bizzell, Bartholomae supports his own conclusions while investigating potential reasons for the choices made in student discourse.
Borrowing from historian Carolyn Steedman, Bartholomae argues that basic writing courses segregate students and replicate social divisions. "In the name of sympathy and empowerment," he writes, "we have once again produced the 'other' who is the incomplete version of ourselves, confirming existing patterns of power and authority, reproducing the hierarchies we had meant to question and overthrow . . . in the 1970s" (18). He also argues that these classes are ultimately necessary because they provide an entry point for students. However, Bartholomae offers several curricular possibilities for basic writing classes in which students are segregated: looking for students' abilities to provide unusual texts as a placement mechanism, eliminating tracking, and creating classes that become "contact zones" in which writers examine and engage differences between one another and the academy. Echoing Mary Louise Pratt, Bartholomae proposes a "curricular program designed not to hide differences . . . but to highlight them, to make them not only the subject of the writing curriculum but the source of its goals and values (at least one of the versions of writing one can learn at the university)" (13).
Bizzell, Patricia. "Basic Writing and the Issue of Correctness, Or, What to Do with 'Mixed' Forms of Academic Discourse." Journal of Basic Writing 19.1 (2000): 4-12.
By reflecting on how hybrid, or mixed, discourses have appeared in academic work and how these discourses might affect basic writing pedagogy, Bizzell seeks to extend and refine arguments raised in her earlier article, "Hybrid Academic Discourses." In this follow-up article, she argues that the increased use of mixed forms means that students no longer need initiation into traditional academic discourse but may need time and assistance to try out various forms combining the academic and nonacademic. Bizzell acknowledges two main points that were not emphasized clearly enough in her earlier article. First, because of cultural fusion in the United States, students come to college with "already mixed linguistic and discursive resources" (9). Second, these mixed, comfortable forms are not used by academic writers and should not be used by students. Instead, these forms "allow their practitioners to do intellectual work in ways they could not if confined to traditional academic discourse" (10).
Compositionists form two theoretical camps: those who are outer-directed, thereby focused on the social processes that influence language learning and thinking, and those who are inner-directed, hence interested in universal writing processes and individual capacities. As inner-directed theorists, Linda Flower and John Hayes support a linear, cognitive model of writing that separates thought, or "planning," from writing, or "translating," yet Flower and Hayes fail to account for individual knowledge and contextual influences. Outer-directed theorists remain skeptical of all models that claim an understanding of inner processes. Accordingly, outer-directed theorists stress the role of community, ethics, politics, and social interaction in the development of thinking and language. A synthesis of theories from both camps will offer a fuller understanding of writing.
Bloom focuses on the issue of renaming the Journal of Basic Writing in view of its changing perspective and content since its first publication twenty-one years before the publication of this article. Naming and renaming are significant actions because of the connotations and expectations a name suggests. When the journal began in 1974, its goal was to change the connotation of remedial, which suggests deficiency, to a more positive descriptor, basic. The topics covered over the next ten years focused mainly on methods of teaching basic writers, but even in the first years, some articles dealt with issues that applied to other composition students. After the 1980s, articles routinely covered a greater range of topics and writing populations. Bloom thinks that the diversity covered currently in the journal suggests a revision of the name to better situate basic writing studies in the field of composition today and to attract more diverse contributors. Over time, basic writer has taken on the connotations that remedial writer had in the past.
Collins contends that Ira Shor is "emphatically wrong" (95) in his assertions about basic writing. Shor presents an "artificially homogenized landscape" (95) of basic writing when, in fact, institutions of higher education deal with the needs of these underprepared writers in diverse ways, some successful and authentic, some not. Furthermore, Shor was in error when he stated that the University of Minnesota General College's basic writing program was a "cash-cow" (95) for the university, paying part-time instructors to teach full-tuition students. Rather, the General College's basic writing program operates with four full-time, tenured or tenure track faculty who are among the best paid in the college. The program has an excellent track record as an integral part of the "eventual success" (97) of the General College students. With his "mis-statements" (96) about the General College's basic writing program, and his correlation of basic writing with "cynical apartheid" (99) agendas on the part of institutions of higher education, Shor paints basic writing instruction as destructive and exploitive and misses the opportunity to discuss the pedagogy in more realistic terms.
See: Ira Shor, "Our Apartheid: Writing Instruction and Inequality" [35].
See: Karen L. Greenberg, "A Response to Ira Shor's 'Our Apartheid: Writing Instruction and Inequality'" [12].
Basic writing studies has not reached professional consensus on such fundamental issues as the mainstreaming of developmental writers and the "universal requirement." While most writers in the field work to democratize educational practices, few share similar research methodologies or even agree about what counts as valid evidence. A critical perspective on methodology reveals the ways in which some texts blend philosophical, practitioner, and historical work but do not allow other voices or perspectives into the scholarly conversation. As a result of this lack of dialectic, researchers frequently reiterate basic positions and overlook opposing claims instead of debating and testing findings to produce convincing generalizations. At a time in which those in charge of basic writing programs frequently need to present a unified front to outside groups, such as administrators and policy makers, more methodological awareness could help them to build consensus and establish common ideological goals.
Looking back on the history of basic writing at the City University of New York and his own experiences as a student, teacher, and scholar, Gilyard asserts that the future of basic writing should involve critiquing "cost effectiveness" arguments in favor of basic writing and framing arguments for students' abilities to voice and gain facility with language. He also challenges the easy use of the term basic writing for its inherent racism, sexism, and classism, while recognizing that it has institutional and personal values for many students and teachers. For Gilyard, basic writing scholarship that ignores students' own social, political, and cultural ideologies often results in privileged pedagogies that center on the formal considerations of students' writing alone. Citing the critical nature of scholarly work like Deborah Mutnick's, Gilyard favors basic writing scholarship that involves continued careful critique of its ideological, political, cultural, and social practices and interests.
Greenberg responds to David Bartholomae's contention at the Fourth Annual Conference on Basic Writing that basic writing programs, in general, do more harm than good to students. She points out that many writing instructors fall into the trap that Bartholomae describes. Refusing to include themselves in the design and implementation of assessment procedures in basic writing, these writing teachers relinquish responsibilities for their programs to administrators, legislators, and others who know little about basic writing. Greenberg then draws on her own experiences at the City University of New York. She shares some of the political challenges basic writing programs face and discusses strategies for meeting these challenges. She also suggests ways to improve basic writing instruction and assessment that will empower basic writing students. Greenberg notes that without basic writing courses-or with the elimination of them at some administrative or legislative level-our colleges and universities will once again become bastions of elitism.
See: David Bartholomae, "The Tidy House: Basic Writing in the American Curriculum" [3].
Greenberg addresses the importance of research methods and priorities in basic writing. After an overview of Janet Emig's formative research in composition, Greenberg recommends that the best research on writing and writers will have "an explicit, comprehensive theoretical foundation based on past and current research in applied linguistics, in cognitive-developmental psychology, in discourse analysis, and in literary theory" (191). Greenberg then describes more than a dozen such studies of basic writers and writing, concluding that they depict developing writers as struggling with writing tasks, rules, and errors due to three interrelated problems: "(1) distorted notions about writing and the composing process, (2) intense writing apprehension in certain contexts, and (3) a tendency to block while writing specific academic tasks" (202). These findings, Greenberg contends, have implications for teaching and for future research in basic writing.
Greenberg offers a strong counterpoint to Shor's contention that basic writing courses should be eliminated in favor of courses based on cultural ideologies and empowerment. Basic writing courses are not "grammar graveyards" (91) or "ghettos" (91) populated only by "Blacks" (90) and "children of poor and working families" (90). They are safe places for a diverse population of underprepared college writers who can use these opportunities for individualized attention to better achieve their own potential in higher education. Greenberg accuses Shor of being an outsider to basic writing issues, of making decontextualized overgeneralizations about basic writing programs, and of treating basic writers stereotypically. Greenberg counters by depicting an effective basic writing classroom that is fully integrated into the English course sequence, displays progressive teaching strategies (such as workshopping, collaboration, and writing process), and provides a safe environment for students to develop necessary writing and critical thinking abilities. Greenberg argues that Shor's approach would lead to the exclusion of underprepared students and support "reactionary" efforts to restrict such students' access to higher education (94).
See: Ira Shor, "Our Apartheid: Writing Instruction and Inequality" [35].
See: Terence G. Collins, "A Response to Ira Shor's 'Our Apartheid: Writing Instruction and Inequality'" [7].
Gunner examines the professional and personal motives behind the creation of the 1997 workshop, "Race, Class, and Culture in the Basic Writing Classroom." The Conference on College Composition and Communication workshop was sponsored by the Conference on Basic Writing and was a forum for the discussion of professional issues such as mainstreaming and analysis of class, identity, and cultural awareness in the basic writing classroom. The invited speakers, including Victor Villanueva, Gary Tate, Jacqueline Jones Royster, and Ira Shor, offered both professional and institutional gravitas to the workshop and to the topic's importance in the profession. Gunner's personal motives emerged from her realization that basic writing concerns were not addressed as an independent field but take place "in other professional arenas" (4). Responding to a paper presented by Charles Schuster in that session, Gunner recognized the need to bridge basic writing and "mainstream" composition. Gunner also admits to being motivated by a "concern for status" (5), in that she states she identifies with and rages against the outsider status, loss of agency, and powerlessness that basic writers experience.
Gunner outlines the debate between scholars and teachers of basic writing, which can be identified by two primary types of discourse. Iconic discourse relies on the legacy of Mina Shaughnessy and her work as an iconic teacher-figure. Critical discourse challenges basic writing conventions. Researchers like Min-Zhan Lu and Ira Shor question Shaughnessy's work and other accepted practices in the field and threaten to diminish the iconic status of Shaughnessy. Gunner maintains that these conflicting discourses explain the alternative and widespread resistance to these articles.
Harrington and Adler-Kassner summarize current debates in the field of basic writing at a "pivotal moment" (3) in its history. To answer the call issued by an increasingly wide range of audiences to define basic writing and basic writers, they explore how these terms have been defined in basic writing scholarship. It also shows that basic writing serves "compelling educational and political functions" (4). Their review of twenty years' worth of literature suggests that basic writing scholarship has taken two perspectives: cognition-based work, which "focus[es] on the writers themselves and what happens in the act of composing" (9), and culture-based work, which "focuses less on individuals than on a sense of institutional or social culture" (12). Ultimately, the authors outline three areas for further investigation: why writers make the decisions they do about their writing, how students define themselves and their work, and how basic writing programs are constructed and administered.
Referring to stories from her teaching experiences, reviews of composition theory, and new analysis of the field, Hill argues for the importance of what she calls double-loop learning and writing from the margins. Finding the spaces between old and new, and between self and other, she argues, means that writers must learn not to accept or reject their preconceived notions, but instead to resee their views in conjunction with differing viewpoints to create a deeper understanding. This is the double-loop learning she discusses-learning that challenges the boundaries of old learning.
Despite compositionists' commitment, they have failed to create a transformative pedagogy-primarily because, as teacher-scholars, they do not disrupt the university's hegemonic discourses. Critical pedagogy illuminates but does not disrupt processes of discursive power and authority because compositionists at the center of those discursive processes self-authorize academic discourse. Even more important, critical pedagogy has not changed perceptions of academic discourse or changed the way we evaluate student writing. In response, Hindman offers a curricular approach to basic writing. It puts evaluative processes at the center of instruction by involving students in mock sessions for grading freshman placement exams. This curricular approach has numerous pedagogical advantages, including destabilizing the power relations between student and teacher, improving student writing, and illustrating how academic discourse standards are socially constructed.
Although Bartholomae and Petrosky's Facts, Artifacts, and Counterfacts [177] "acknowledges that for basic writers the problem of writing in the university is the problem of appropriating power and authority" (62), only a curriculum that interrogates the professional politics of English, including placement practices, would enable students to gain access to the discursive power that drives academic authority. Problematizing the notion of marginality, Hindman argues that students must learn the intellectual gesture of setting their discourse against the apparently commonplace or naïve, thus enabling them to adopt the margins as a conscious position from which to critique mainstream writing practice. For instructors to facilitate the reawakened agency of basic writers, we must be willing to read against the grain of our own professional discourse.
In this alternative history of basic writing, Horner reads a number of texts that are often neglected in basic writing scholarship (including the City University of New York memos and internal documents written by administrators and Mina Shaughnessy's unpublished or lesser known writings) as well as well-known ones (including Errors and Expectations [113] and the Journal of Basic Writing). He argues that these texts were critical in basic writing's formation as a discourse during the 1970s. Through close readings informed by Marxist and poststructuralist theory, Horner criticizes the ways in which this discourse has marginalized the concrete material, political, institutional, and sociohistorical realities that face basic writing teachers and students. Horner also investigates this discourse's convergence with an ongoing public discourse on education that problematically denies the academy's involvement in material, political, social, and historical worlds. Finally, Horner calls for more histories of basic writing that recover and expose the material, historical, and political contexts of basic writing, teaching, and theorizing.
In its descriptive representation of student needs and problems, the "new" discourse of basic writing that emerged during the 1960s and 1970s positioned basic writing outside of the social, political, and historical contexts of its production and reception. Rather than trace what might be considered a canon of basic writing texts, the eight cultural materialist readings that Horner and Lu present in this book analyze the discourse of basic writing as a discourse of renegotiation shaped and reshaped by the context of its production and reception.
Hunter provides a rhetorical analysis of "Toward a Literate Democracy," the 1980 Journal of Basic Writing issue published in memory of Mina Shaughnessy. Hunter applies the characteristics of the epitaphios logos (funeral oration) to the essays gathered in this memorial volume: the enkomion (praise), parainesis (lament), and paramythia (consolation). At the same time, he describes the political purpose of the funeral oration in Athenian society and raises questions concerning the political dimension of the current addresses. Noting that none of the five speakers included from the First Shaughnessy Memorial Conference had any experience teaching basic writing, Hunter considers the focus of each of the speakers' addresses and attempts to assess Shaughnessy as outside the historical context in which she worked, which served to "enshrine [her] within the tribe of a conservative academic elite" (925).
These six presentations explore and critique the foundations and philosophies of basic writing. Four of the contributors to this symposium are responding to critiques by Min-Zhan Lu and Paul Hunter in the December 1992 issue of College English of the work of basic writing pioneers Kenneth Bruffee, Thomas Farrell, and, especially, Mina Shaughnessy. Lu had argued for a pedagogy of conflict to help basic writers reposition themselves, and both Lu and Hunter had pointed to the influence of these pioneers and their followers as the conservative element resisting such pedagogy. Patricia Laurence and Barbara Gleason present the case for historicizing the discussion-for evaluating both the philosophy of the pioneers and the criticism of Lu and Hunter from the contexts in which each worked/works. Peter Rondinone, a former open-admission student at the City University of New York and now college English professor, takes Lu to task for missing the point about conflict in the lives of many basic writing students, while Thomas Farrell includes personal experiences with Shaughnessy. The symposium concludes with responses by both Hunter and Lu, with Lu's being the more in-depth response to each of the preceding critiques.
In its history of student-centered research and its commitment to students who have been traditionally marginalized and devalued by higher education, basic writing has been at the forefront of diversity and student-centered learning. Because students in basic writing exist in the borderlands between discourse communities, they are, presumably, the diverse students that the university's promotional materials seem to pursue. Thus, Lu and Horner suggest that basic writers can teach faculty about the challenges diverse students face and the kinds of pedagogies that work for them. The authors also argue that basic writing must recognize and draw on basic writers' political agency, as students and faculty together fight against the nationwide assaults on basic writing programs.
In this article, Maher introduces her biography, Mina P. Shaughnessy: Her Life and Work. Maher describes how her own education, ideals, and career have intersected with that of her subject: similar working-class backgrounds, attendance (Maher) and teaching (Shaughnessy) at the City University of New York colleges, and careers devoted to the education of basic writing students all bring biographer and subject together. Maher tells the story of the biographical process-her interest in and respect for Shaughnessy's work, the initial impulse to write the story of Shaughnessy's life, the quest for information, and the biographer's difficulties in telling a life story. Readers are introduced to Mina Shaughnessy's life and, in its unfolding, discover what motivated her to advocate for open admissions and what made it possible for her to write the landmark work, Errors and Expectations [113]. The overview of Shaughnessy's life from her family history to her death provides a minibiography, while Maher's personal perspectives show the relationship of biographer to subject.
This collection of essays presents many of the various positions taken in response to recent challenges posed to basic writing instruction on four-year college campuses. At the same time, it offers alternative configurations for writing instruction that attempt to do justice to both students' needs and administrative constraints. Contributors include Edward M. White, Ira Shor, Mary Soliday, Trudy Smoke, Barbara Gleason, Terence G. Collins, Kim Lynch, Eleanor Agnew, Margaret McLaughlin, Marti Singer, Rosemary Winslow, Monica Mische, Mark Wiley, Gerri McNenny, and Sallyanne Fitzgerald.
Mutnick outlines a detailed history of basic writing, beginning in the late 1960s with Mina Shaughnessy. She argues that Shaughnessy's major contributions were her ability to shift the focus of research from the students to the "teachers, administrators, and society" (185) and her understanding that the logical errors produced by students held the key to their attempts to arrive at conventional forms. Mutnick's history moves on to other theories of error that followed those of Shaughnessy and then to a discussion of process and cognitive theories and rhetorical theories. Mutnick also warns that we must prepare ourselves to counter political decisions now being made in higher education.
Like the political assaults on other opportunities for equal access to higher education-efforts to reverse affirmative action and to end open admissions-eradicating basic writing will resegregate higher education. Thus, well-meaning compositionists who fear that basic writing has reinscribed the injustices it sought to remedy should reconsider their efforts to eliminate basic writing. In documenting the success of basic writing programs, experiments with new models of instruction, and partnerships between high schools and universities, Mutnick argues that everyone in our discipline who cares about social justice should find ways to make basic writing more effective and just for traditionally underprepared and marginalized groups.
Ribble advocates a shift in our thinking about basic writing and writers: from error as the defining characteristic to the rhizome as a connected, ecological system. Ribble shows the way a student's paper simultaneously exhibits good writing, creativity in expressing ideas and feelings, and multiple errors in spelling, punctuation, and grammar. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Ribble discusses four rhizomic principles: connectivity relates to our desire to communicate with others; heterogeneity represents linguistic variety; and multiplicity represents the complexity of writing and writers; and asignifying rupture addresses the fragmentation that change creates. Errors therefore are a necessary part of the lifelong process of learning and writing. The rhizome metaphor is especially relevant to technologic communication: "only a metaphor as complex as the rhizome can handle the multitasking our students are born into" (par. 33). We would do well, Ribble suggests, to rethink our conceptions of basic writing in similar ways.
Rose argues that "institutional language about writing instruction in American higher education" effectively "keeps writing instruction at the periphery of the curriculum" (341). This language and its attendant metaphors are based on behaviorist models and misunderstandings about writing and do not take students' abilities and needs into account. Rose discusses in detail the effects of behaviorism and quantification on thinking about writing: the emphasize correctness, mechanistic paradigms, and pseudoscientific reasoning rather than the social context of error. Defining writing as a "skill" rather than as a means of inquiry has political and educational implications. The terminology associated with remediation originated in law and medicine, and its application to writing instruction is critiqued in the context of this medical metaphor. The language of literacy and illiteracy is inadequate to represent the realities of basic writing instruction. Also, according to the "myth of transience" (355), the problems associated with basic writing and writers could be cured and thereby eliminated if certain criteria could be met. Remediation as a metaphor must be abandoned. Rose concludes that "wide-ranging change will occur only if the academy redefines writing for itself, changes the terms of the argument, sees instruction in writing as one of its central concerns" (359).
With this study, Rose seeks to inspire more careful critique of schools because "our national discussion about public schools is despairing and dismissive, and it is shutting down our civic imagination" (1). Thus, Rose observed classrooms across the country, concluding that good classrooms are safe classrooms where teachers respect students and manage to distribute authority to them. Teaching like this involves the interplay of multiple "knowledges," some of which are brought to the classroom by teachers, and some by students. Even in the "at-risk" environments Rose describes, there is great possibility for public education to construct active and critical citizens but only if schools recognize the "possible lives" that fill the halls on a daily basis.
Royster and Taylor challenge us to examine the place of teachers in the classroom, calling for a shift in the gaze that has been turned-nearly throughout the whole of basic writing scholarship-toward students. How are teachers, they ask, located in the basic writing classroom? This reading is decidedly against the grain of basic writing scholarship, for Royster and Taylor interrogate teacher identity and its absence as a focus of research in basic writing. They remark that they had "become impatient with the discussion of identity, most especially in basic writing classrooms, as the students' problem, rather than also as the teacher's problem" (28). Their call for additional research on teacher identity as an informing element of classrooms speaks to the tendency in composition studies at large to deny the power of teacher authority. The essay stands as a call for new and vigorous inquiry into the location of teachers in the college writing classroom, the ways students see teachers, and the implications of those constructs for the basic writing classroom.
Sheridan-Rabideau and Brossell defend the effectiveness of basic writing courses on college campuses. They argue that colleges and universities are obligated to provide the support that enables student success, particularly support for students who are underprepared. Inexperience lends basic writers to demonstrate a range of writing problems. Therefore, basic writing classes should not be a mix of more and less proficient writers, should have fewer students, should meet for more hours than regular composition courses, and should be taught by well-trained faculty who provide extensive feedback on students' writing. The basic writing class should provide a safe, supportive environment where underprepared students can gain the confidence and skills that can help them achieve academic success.
Shor begins this essay with an analysis of the work of Mina Shaughnessy, Adrienne Rich, and Leonard Greenbaum, all teachers of writing at the City College of New York during the open-admission period, who believed that the emphasis on "correctness" in language instruction could "debase" (Shaughnessy) and disempower students. Shor then connects their positions to John Kenneth Galbraith's proposal that economics drives education policy. An analysis of the economic context of first-year writing instruction, according to Shor, can help explain its political contradictions, complaints, and choices, such as its focus on error and correctness. This focus, he argues, reflects the values of an elite culture and reproduces the inequalities necessary for that culture to remain elite. The kind of long-term instruction in the "correct" use of language embedded in K-16 writing instruction shapes students' and teachers' views of the world. To change those views, Shor proposes a critical writing curriculum that would replace the one currently in place and a democratic labor policy to replace the exploitation of cheap labor in the staffing of courses.
See: Mina P. Shaughnessy, Errors and Expectations: A Guide for the Teacher of Basic Writing [113].
This response to criticism by Karen Greenberg [12] and Terence Collins [7] repeats Shor's basic points from the original article: teachers of basic writing are an exploited labor force; claims for the success of basic writing programs are equivocal; minority and working-class students are overrepresented in basic writing classes; and most basic writing curricula perpetuate a pedagogy of disembodied language arts and impede a pedagogy of critical engagement with everyday life.
Shor argues that basic writing as a field is in a state of permanent crisis. While composition functions as a linguistic gatekeeper in the university, basic writing acts as a gate below the gate. As part of the undemocratic tracking system in mass education, basic writing successfully impedes the academic progress of nonelite students. In effect, Shor suggests that basic writing supports a top-down, business-oriented agenda that is designed to keep the status quo by moving nonelite students into vocational jobs and disciplined lives. As a basement course that is often taught by marginalized, overworked adjuncts, basic writing fosters depressed wages and few health benefits. Democratic education demands an end to educational apartheid through the dismantling of basic writing.
See: Terence G. Collins, "A Response to Ira Shor's 'Our Apartheid: Writing Instruction and Inequality'" [7].
See: Karen L. Greenberg, "A Response to Ira Shor's 'Our Apartheid: Writing Instruction and Inequality'" [12].
Basic writing programs at West Coast research universities face a double bind: the privileging of research and graduate education in comparison to all lower-division undergraduate writing courses (especially basic writing courses) and the passing of antiaffirmative action ballot initiatives. The University of Washington is a case in point. The "unraveling" of its basic writing program is demonstrated through critical discourse analysis of three texts: the university's "master plan" for the next twenty years; a Seattle newspaper's take on the Educational Opportunity Program, which houses basic writing, and Initiative-2000, which bans "preferential" treatment in education; and the conclusions of the Washington 2020 Commission, a gubernatorial commission formed to determine the future of higher education in Washington State.
Survey responses from 900 two- and four-year colleges and universities reveal that a majority have some form of basic writing program and that most are housed in English departments. Teaching assistants or part-time faculty teach the bulk of basic writing courses, with only a few receiving systematic teaching orientation. Building on Robert Connors's study of the remedial textbook market, Trimmer interviewed representatives from twenty publishing houses who revealed that editors find the remedial textbook market "difficult and disheartening" (6) because schools are caught in political predicaments that force them to adopt workbooks or sentence-grammar texts. Editors have read research concerning basic writing but have witnessed good textbook proposals become publishing disasters. Perhaps basic writing research has no impact because remedial English teachers are too overworked to read research, or perhaps the research simply is not known, not understood, or not believed because it challenges tradition.
See: Robert J. Connors, "Basic Writing Textbooks: History and Current Avatars" [179].
Although basic writing is a much more positive term than the medical remedial and the condescending developmental, readers are cautioned not to generalize about what basic writers do or who they are. Remedial, developmental, and basic oversimplify the diverse students who are often labeled as underprepared. Troyka defines basic writing in historical relation to remedial writing and developmental writing as well as through a national survey of basic writing essays she completed to better shape future scholarship and teaching undertaken in the name of basic writing. Two crucial conclusions are offered. First, basic writers are not simply writers; hence, any definition of basic writing must take into account how "basic writers need to immerse themselves in language in all its forms" (13). Thus teachers and researchers need to consider the centrality of reading to writing. Second, we must define basic writers in context, which means we must "describe with examples our student populations when we write about basic writers" (13). This important essay demonstrates why our students' diversity and the context of their specific writing situations are not generalizable through the term basic writing.
Written as a letter to the editors of the Journal of Basic Writing, this essay contends that basic writing scholars and practitioners have failed the "BW enterprise" (114). First, basic writing scholarship and practice have not dealt effectively with public relations issues. Troyka contends that to be more successful, basic writing needs to be more visible and articulate within the popular media. Second, Troyka argues that basic writing has suffered for lack of real assessment outcomes. Since scholars have tended to avoid longitudinal studies, there has been little tangible evidence for the validity of the efforts. Third, Troyka contends that in an effort to value students' voices and political, social, and cultural differences, we have simultaneously ignored the potential values of grammar instruction. She urges us to find new and innovative ways to teach grammar rather than ignore it. Finally, Troyka proffers that basic writing has limited the kinds of scholarly inquiries that are considered valuable, necessarily marginalizing certain kinds of research while privileging others. In closing, however, she suggests that successes can be found in basic writing teaching, an important site for theorizing. For Troyka, this is a location where she feels innovative work continues to be accomplished, a place that, if studied closely, might help us rectify other problems.
Basic writing is under attack on many fronts, and such attacks are at least partly caused by ineffective marketing. That is, too many people see basic writing as remedial without understanding what it is, what it is intended to do, or where it fits in the academy. Wiener suggests that such attacks on funding and outsourcing of basic writing classes and students will continue but that we must continue to work to counter these attacks.