Basic Writing. George Otte
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my students had just written their first essays and where I now began to read them, hoping to be able to assess quickly the sort of task that lay ahead of us that semester. But the writing was so stunningly unskilled that I could not begin to define the task nor even sort out the difficulties. I could only sit there, reading and re-reading the alien papers, wondering what had gone wrong and trying to understand what I at this eleventh hour of my students’ academic lives could do about it.
Looking at these papers now, I have no difficulty assessing the work to be done nor believing that it can be done. (vii)
This transformation from confounded to confident would seem magical had Shaughnessy not supplied samples of the student writing she was referring to along with the thinking she brought to bear on it. Suddenly, for teachers in a world defined much more by textbooks than by studies of writing, here was someone who spoke as one of them, puzzling over real student texts and making sense of them.
Her ability to dispel what she called the “‘mystery’ of error” (according to Robert Lyons, her book was originally titled The Logic of Error [“Mina Shaughnessy” 183]) was complemented by an ability to think and feel along with the students, to enter into both the affective and cognitive dimensions of error:
The “mystery” of error is what most intimidates students—the worry that errors just “happen” without a person’s knowing how or when. . . . Freedom from error is finally a matter of understanding error, not of getting special dispensation to err simply because writing formal English is thought to be beyond the capabilities or interests of some students. (127–28)
This demystification of error is a complex task, but Shaughnessy conveys the invincible conviction that, for the students’ sake, it must be done, and it can be done. Seeing how it could be done led the reviewer in The Chronicle of Higher Education to say that Shaughnessy had brought to bear on student writing the kind of “intelligence that literary scholars have traditionally been trained to lavish on T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound”; her urgency that it must be done made him reckon her book a “force that can redirect the energies of an entire profession” (Hungiville 18).
For all this, there remains the focus on error, with its ramifications for the new field. Just how would and should the profession’s energies be (re)directed? Shaughnessy was clear that error was only an important initial focus—not the be-all and end-all of basic writing. Still, one has to start somewhere, and (a choice made all the more consequential by her early death) error seemed to her the place to start. She explained why in her introduction to the first issue of the Journal of Basic Writing (JBW), the in-house journal she ushered into being in 1975 with an entire issue devoted to error. Characteristically, she opens with the sense of a new student population:
A policy of admissions that reaches out beyond traditional sources for its students, bringing in to a college campus young men and women from diverse classes, races, and cultural backgrounds who have attended good, poor, and mediocre schools, is certain to shake the assumptions and even the confidence of teachers who have been trained to serve a more uniform and prepared student population. (“Introduction” 1)
In introducing the new journal, she seems almost apologetic about the perceived necessity of foregrounding errors, as much as they figure in the initial impressions of teachers (to say nothing of placement assessments readers). “Error,” she confesses,
may seem to be an old place to begin a new discussion of writing. It is, after all, a subject English teachers already know about. Some people would claim that it is the English teacher’s obsession with error that has killed writing for generations of students. Yet error—the unintentional deviation from expected patterns—dominates the writing of many of the new students, inhibiting them and their readers from concentrating on what is being said. And while no English teacher seems to have difficulty counting up and naming errors, few have been in the habit of observing them fruitfully, with the intent, that is, of understanding why intelligent young adults who want to be right seem to go on, persistently and even predictably, being wrong. (3–4)
In introducing the articles in this first issue of JBW, Shaughnessy notes that the issue’s “opening and concluding articles take up some of the social and pedagogical issues that hover about the subject of error” (4). The first article, Sarah D’Eloia’s “Teaching Standard Written English,” begins by unapologetically and unequivocally announcing the conviction that “teaching ‘basic’ writing is synonymous with teaching standard written English” (5). Its counterweight is the concluding article, Isabella Halsted’s “Putting Error in Its Place,” which approvingly cites the 1974 Conference on College Composition and Communication position paper “Students’ Right to Their Own Language” and argues that “a major problem our students (and we ourselves) have is fixation on Error” (77). Certainly, D’Eloia’s and Halsted’s positions were not the extremes they could be taken to; moderated by Shaughnessy’s gravitational pull, they were brought into closer orbit around her center. Shaughnessy, as Glynda Hull has noted, occupied a kind of critical middle ground in those early days, staking out
a position [that] can be seen as a sidestep, even a sleight of hand, since it shifts our attention from the overwhelming question of whether we ought to sanction through our roles as teachers the existence of a privileged language, particularly when privileged means only arbitrarily approved scribal conventions. But it can also be seen as a compelling argument, both to provide instruction on error and to include editing among those aspects of writing worth our study. (“Research” 167)
Shaughnessy had her own ways of registering what she might be sidestepping, as when (at the end of Errors and Expectations) she allows that college, for the students she cares so much for, can have a negative aspect despite its proffered rewards, “threatening at the same time to take them from their distinctive ways of interpreting the world, to assimilate them into the culture of academia without acknowledging their experience as outsiders” (292). And, of course, it is not just what a teacher focuses on but how. Hull grants Shaughnessy not only a compelling argument for a focus on error but also a compelling method: a determination “to study error from the point of view of causation” (“Research” 173). This resolve to investigate the whys of what writers did opened up new vistas for basic writing: once the question was what was happening in the writer’s mind, the answers could not stop with treatments of error, and so studies of process, cognition, and resistance ultimately came to take center stage.
But, at the time, there were also more practical concerns to be dealt with. The original pioneer in what she memorably labeled the frontier (she concluded as well as began the bibliographic essay “Basic Writing” with that figure) spent her last years not only making a beginning for the field, notably with Errors and Expectations and the Journal of Basic Writing but also fighting off what looked like its end. Maher’s biography of Shaughnessy makes especially compelling reading in its discussion of her last years as a university administrator. It was a time of fiscal crisis for New York as the city was near bankruptcy, and fledgling programs were especially vulnerable to cuts. An attempt to bring enrollments down included proposed entrance exams, which Shaughnessy opposed as “the end of the University’s Open Admissions policy” (from her memo to the Board of Higher Education, qtd. in Maher, Shaughnessy 177); as an alternative, she began work on a never-realized project of collaboration with high schools that would ensure better preparation for college. The inaugural issue of Resource, the newsletter of the Instructional Resource Center she created and directed, began, “As I write this, we are still uncertain about the kind of University the budget cutters will finally allow us, and the survey of CUNY Skills programs which we began runs the risk of being more historical than we originally planned” (qtd. in Maher Shaughnessy 179).
That was May 1976. The month before, as the keynote speaker at the first conference of the CUNY Association of Writing Supervisors (CAWS), she had given a more detailed and poignant picture of what the budget cuts might mean, had indeed already meant:
These are discouraging times for all of us, most particularly for the teachers who have been working with unprepared students on basic skills. Both students and teachers are already discovering that they are expendable, and the programs they have helped to build over the past five years to remedy the failure of the public schools (and the society of