Basic Writing. George Otte
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campuses:
•Our staffs are shrinking and our class size increasing.
•Talented young teachers who were ready to concentrate their scholarly energies on the sort of research and teaching we need in basic writing are looking for jobs.
•Each day brings not a new decision but rumors of new decisions, placing us in the predicament of those mice in psychological experiments who must keep shifting their expectations until they are too rattled to function.
•Our campuses buzz like an Elizabethan court with talk of who is in favor and who is out. And we meet our colleagues from other campuses with relief: “Ah, good,” we say (or think to ourselves)—“you’re still here.”
•We struggle each day to extract from the Orwellian Language that announces new plans and policies some clear sense of what is finally going to become of the students whom the university in more affluent times committed itself to educate. (“The Miserable Truth” 263–64)
Things would get worse, considerably worse. The need to curtail enrollments (and so expenses) was achieved not by entrance exams but by the charging of tuition, something the Board of Higher Education voted through in June 1976. An account of this time, LaVona L. Reeves’s “Mina Shaughnessy and Open Admissions at New York’s City College” (2002), succinctly outlines the immediate consequences: “In the fall of 1976, enrollment had declined 17 percent, making it necessary for several thousand faculty members to be laid off. As usual, the last to be hired were the first to be fired, and many of the newer minority teachers lost their jobs, despite massive student protests” (123).
Such was the turmoil that surrounded Shaughnessy as an administrator, and it made the publication of Errors and Expectations in the same academic year all that much more the “godsend” Reeves calls it (123). The honors and attentions bestowed on Shaughnessy and her book had to be gratifying, given the circumstances, but they did not change those circumstances. Only weeks after the release of the book, Shaughnessy was diagnosed with kidney cancer, first misdiagnosed as a stress-related ulcer (Maher, Shaughnessy 200). By December 1977, she was diagnosed as having a brain tumor. By November of the following year, she was dead.
The memorializing of Mina Shaughnessy, beginning with an event in December 1978 at which Adrienne Rich, Irving Howe, and others spoke, went on for some time. She was eulogized by Janet Emig in the February 1979 issue of College Composition and Communication and by E. D. Hirsch and others at an MLA conference special session at the end of that year. As late as 1985, Robert Lyons, summing up the “most widely respected authority on basic writing in this country,” stated, “In a field often marked by controversy and division, her work was invariably accorded attention and respect” (171–72). Lyons tellingly preceded his remarks with the admission that “I still find it difficult to accept her absence and to regard her as a writer and teacher to be appraised rather than solely as a colleague to be mourned” (171). By force of personality as well as intellect, marshaling support and sympathy for the students who mattered so much to her and for the instruction she believed would save them, Mina Shaughnessy had an influence on basic writing, one that the field is still learning to reckon with. In the years that were to come, Shaughnessy’s legacy was revered by some but found to be stiflingly enduring by others, as is suggested by the title of an essay published two full decades after her death: Jeanne Gunner’s “Iconic Discourse: The Troubling Legacy of Mina Shaughnessy.” But in the decade following the one she dominated, critiques of her were in fact rare, though winds of change certainly swept the BW landscape.
Maxine Hairston’s “The Winds of Change,” based on her speech at the 1978 convention of the Conference on College Composition and Communication and published in 1982, heralded a paradigm shift in composition, including a turn of attention from product to process. Much of the impetus for this shift came from BW research, not least of all from what Glynda Hull called the resolve “to study error from the point of view of causation” (173). In addition to Shaughnessy’s own work, which had been preceded by her good friend Janet Emig’s seminal study The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders (1971), there were several especially noteworthy research projects and publications as the 1970s came to an end. A particularly clear-cut case of a causal approach to error was Muriel Harris’s 1978 College English article “Individual Diagnoses: Searching for Causes, Not Symptoms of Writing Deficiencies.” That same year saw the completion of Sondra Perl’s important dissertation “Five Writers Writing: Case Studies of the Composing Processes of Unskilled College Writers,” which quickly spawned a series of articles: “The Composing Processes of Unskilled College Writers” (1979), “Understanding Composing” (1980), and “A Look at Basic Writers in the Process of Composing” (1980). In addition to providing the case studies Shaughnessy had called for, Perl backed up Shaughnessy’s claim that basic writers were not without established writing patterns and processes; the problem was that these processes tended to be far from efficient or proficient, full of disruptions in the flow of thought, ironically creating and compounding errors partly out of a debilitating attempt to eliminate them.
The 1980s
The process movement, which had its roots in the 1970s, flourished in the 1980s. Early in the decade, critical work in BW on the writing process was highlighted in themed issues of journals like the Fall/Winter 1981 issue of the Journal of Basic Writing devoted to revision and the “Language Studies and Composing” issue of College Composition and Communication published in May of that same year. Attention soon widened to show how the process of writing was also the process of thinking about writing. Why not make the process of thought itself a focus of study, particularly in application to basic writers? At the end of her bibliographic essay, Shaughnessy had noted that “no effort has as yet been made to determine how accurately the developmental model Piaget describes for children fits the experience of the young adults learning to write for college” (“Basic Writing” 206).
This was, in effect, an invitation that many would accept. An important early example was Mike Rose’s 1980 essay “Rigid Rules, Inflexible Plans, and the Stifling of Language: A Cognitivist Analysis of Writer’s Block.” Not the first—Linda Flower had already published “Writer-Based Prose: A Cognitive Basis for Problems in Writing” in College English in 1979—but Rose’s was the rare treatment of such ideas by a teacher/researcher with graduate training in developmental psychology. Significantly, Flower teamed up with John R. Hayes, a cognitive psychologist, as her coauthor in other articles: “Problem Solving Strategies and the Writing Process” (1977), “The Dynamics of Composing: Making Plans and Juggling Constraints” (1979), “The Cognition of Discovery: Defining a Rhetorical Problem” (1980), and “Problem Solving and the Cognitive Processes of Writing” (1981). Another early “cognitivist”—her “Cognitive Development and the Basic Writer” had been published in College English in 1979—was Andrea A. Lunsford, the person picked to do the “Basic Writing Update” that followed Shaughnessy’s bibliographic essay “Basic Writing” in the revised and expanded 1986 edition of Gary Tate’s anthology of bibliographic essays, Teaching Composition. Lunsford began as a researcher in basic writing (it had been the focus of her dissertation), eventually becoming one of the foremost scholars in composition (she became chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication in 1989). At this point, her major focus was cognitive development, and she may have produced the best summation of its perceived relevance to basic writing and to composition generally in “Cognitive Studies and Teaching Writing” in the 1985 MLA overview Perspectives on Research and Scholarship in Composition.
Though the tide would turn against it—Mike Rose would be speaking of “cognitive reductionism” in the late 1980s (“Narrowing the Mind”)—efforts to place (and move) basic writers along a scheme of cognitive development proliferated in the first part of the decade. As titles like “Building Cognitive Skills in Basic Writers” (Spear) and “Cognitive Immaturity and Remedial College Writers” (Bradford) suggest, work of this kind partook in the two great tasks BW teachers and researchers had set for themselves: to define what they should do and to define whom they should do it to.
The latter project was the more pressing one. Just who was the basic writer? What were the distinguishing features? Answers were needed to warrant the appropriate pedagogical strategies and to set the