2 Defining Basic Writing and Basic Writers

      In the early 1960s, remedial work in college seemed to be fading away. In 1963, Albert Kitzhaber reported in Themes, Theories, and Therapy that the “number of colleges and universities offering remedial English courses has dropped sharply” and would drop further because of rising enrollments and raised standards (18). In “Basic Writing,” Mina Shaughnessy acknowledged that “this type of course was waning,” with the immediate qualification that, because of social changes in the 1960s, a new “remedial population” was on the way (178).

      It was in fact this sense of a cultural shift and a new population granted access to college that caused Shaughnessy, in this same essay, to call the “‘new’ remedial English” “basic writing” (BW), thereby creating something else that could be called new: a field of teaching and scholarship constituted as such, conscious of itself and its mission and proud of work that had previously been hidden. Wanting to be seen as both new and necessary, basic writing has always needed to distinguish itself, to say what it is and whom it is for.

      To an unusual extent, however, BW derives its conceptual existence by being distinguished from related kinds of instruction. First-year composition is the most obvious point of comparison and contrast: basic writing has to be more “basic” somehow, situated underneath or before what is nevertheless conceived as introductory. It is also, by its nature, associated with remediation, developmental education, “pre-college instruction,” ESL (English as a Second Language), ELL (English Language Learning), and other related fields.

      Still, over the years, first-year composition is the course to which basic writing has had the closest connection. It could be said that basic writing has recapitulated the fate of first-year composition. Starting out, as composition did, with a powerful and perhaps undue attention to error, BW broadened its purview to include a host of other instructional interests: matters of process, voice, genre, development, diversity, and so on. In so doing, it matured, no doubt, but it matured into something ever harder to distinguish (and to keep separate) from first-year composition, which had experienced its own markedly similar diversification of interests.

      The other source of definition for basic writing, its student population, was always a troubled question. Leaders in the field were often critical of the assessments that defined their constituency. They were understandably loath to insist on hard and fast distinctions where none existed, at least none they found defensible. Finally, it turned out that the crucial distinction of basic writing, the difference and disadvantage it had in mirroring the development of first-year composition, is that, though first-year comp never had something like first-year comp to disappear into, BW did. When it seemed a budgetary or political liability, its opponents could argue it away because its advocates had brought it (and its students) ever closer to the point where their rightful place seemed to be first-year composition. The students either ought to find their way into mainstream composition courses, the logic went, or disappear altogether. Ultimately, they did both, in droves. (See chapter 5 for a fuller discussion of the status of basic writing at the beginning of the twenty-first century.)

      But we are getting ahead of ourselves. In this chapter, we focus on matters of definition both for the field of basic writing and for the students it serves.

Early Definitions

      Basic writing is distinguished first and foremost by its history. Attention to a new cadre of students, formerly excluded from higher education but then provisionally admitted, gave rise to the new field. Yet however new the students themselves might have been, the instruction given them was not created out of whole cloth but rewoven from existing strands. Mina Shaughnessy had to rename the field to save it from being stuck in the nether regions already denoted by terms like “remedial” or “bonehead” English (“Basic Writing” 178). This attempt at renaming and re-creation was never wholly successful. The stigmata of remediation, structurally integrated into BW from the start, persisted as issues of funding, staffing, and status. The struggle to achieve selfhood and respectability as a field included redefining the curriculum for the sake of the students, improving their access and progress. But it never managed to redefine the way basic writing itself was marginalized. Relegated to the margins of the institution, BW ultimately came to represent, at least to some, a locus of instruction that could save its students from marginalization only by disappearing, allowing students to flow unobstructed into the “mainstream.” Mainstreaming is by no means the end of the story for basic writing; however, it is a way of underscoring that BW itself was never fully accepted into the academy and so gives us good reason to attend not only to how BW defines itself but also to how it gets defined.

Basic Writing as a Fix-It Station

      Regarding basic writing, academia responded to profound change as if it were a temporary disruption of the presumably enduring status quo. Just as colleges and universities responded to growing enrollments with temporary positions that became permanent features of the landscape, BW became a kind of halfway house addressing problems that presumably would or should be solved by better college preparation—though it would take a social revolution to redress the disadvantages of students who wind up in basic writing. This was a predicament sounded prophetically by Mina Shaughnessy. In