This paper describes basic skills in terms of three stages of the writing process: drafting, editing, and preservation. During the drafting stage, the basics are those skills and attitudes necessary to release the students' powers of expression. It is basic that they learn how to start and maintain a flow of words and ideas, how to use various techniques to keep their minds occupied with a topic long enough to produce the quantity of draft necessary to work out their private meanings, and how to make use of their own sources, those inside their own heads. Students must learn how to generate comparisons and analogies, and must analyze the language they use to talk about a topic so that they can make their ideas about the topic orderly and clear. Students must learn how to edit so that their thoughts are in a clear, organized, and coherent form. After students have learned to draft and edit, they should become concerned with the problems of preservation, of making a public text. In this stage, correctness is basic. The techniques of word-study are suggested as a method for helping students develop these basic skills. (TS)