This essay extends arguments made by Gray-Rosendale in two earlier essays published within the Journal of Basic Writing (1999 and 2006), ones that focused on how basic writers' identities were being constructed in our scholarship. She traced developments in various approaches--developmentalist and grammar-based models (1970s), academic discourse…

Basic writing, which developed as a field within the larger discipline of rhetoric and composition, has a tumultuous past and an uncertain future. What began as an academic response to a perceived literacy crisis with the rise of open admissions in the late 1960s has continued to grow and reinvent its structures, theories, and practices as new…

The Converging Literacies Center (CLiC) is a deeply integrated model for writing programs, bringing together the writing center, first-year writing, basic writing, professional development activities, graduate coursework, and research activities to re-imagine and support twenty-first-century literacies. What is unique about CLiC is not merely the…

In an effort to live up to Elaine Richardson's dictum that educators and researchers must address "the total linguistic, cultural, and historical background of the learner" (19), basic writing scholarship has addressed a wealth of competencies that basic writers bring with them to the university. The literate lives they lead beyond the…

This article discusses exchanges between a number of scholars during the 1990s centering on Min-Zhan Lu's controversial essay "Conflict and Struggle: The Enemies or Preconditions of Basic Writing?" In some ways, "Conflict and Struggle" blazed a trail for later work in "hybrid" or "mixed" forms of academic writing while at the same time igniting…

When scholars write about their research in writing programs' archives, they often face the ethical question of whether to name the administrators who were involved in documents. The author identifies and provides examples of three basic orientations to this issue, which he calls overt-historical, covert-qualitative, and hybrid-institutional.…

Investigates the contradictory terminological investments within the charges against Mina Shaughnessy's scholarship (i.e., "essentialism,""accommodationism," and lack of "materialist praxis") from poststructuralist, feminist, and Marxist quarters. Maintains, through close readings of Shaughnessy's texts, that the…

Examines the relationship between handwriting speed and the syntactic complexity of the finished piece of writing. Reports that findings support previous research that describes differences in syntax of basic and traditional writers. Concludes that writing teachers should encourage college students to write rapidly as they draft their pieces. (MM)

Offers a review of research on remedial/developmental writers, focusing on studies related to revising strategies, the development of writing abilities, spoken language, rhetorical context, semantic abbreviation in writing, composing processes, writer's block, and thought and language. (DMM)

Demonstrates that students who attempt graphically to represent their own writing process increase their involvement and self-awareness while validating their new writing behaviors and come to understand their role in managing the unique complexities of their own composing process. (SR)

Presents the results of a questionnaire which asked students to distinguish the most helpful instructional factors and activities aiding their writing progress. Concludes that the student's voice is his/her most accessible tool for progress, that acceptance of the student's voice is crucial, and that the speaking-writing connection is the most…

Foregrounds issues of race, ethnicity, and education, and ties together two important issues in teaching basic writing: how social and pedagogical issues in higher education shape possibilities for bicultural students' writings, and how these students can use their developing sense of literacy and their texts to explore identity. Discusses…

Compares White and African-American basic writers' texts produced during districtwide holistic writing assessments. Shows that White basic writers differ little from African-American basic writers, although African-Americans tend to use a stronger personal voice and drop standard word ending. Concludes that dialect is not the key issue. (MG)

Studies whether students who reread their drafts aloud as they revise compose essays that are stylistically superior to those of students who do not. Finds this makes a difference for students with adequate to proficient reading skills but not for poor readers. Suggests basic writing courses should focus on reading and style, besides principles of…

More than ten years have passed since the widely publicized debate about personal and academic writing that played out in the 1990s between Peter Elbow and David Bartholomae. But the question of the relative merits of these two different types of writing for student writers continues to be an issue of concern for teachers of composition,…