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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 the conclusion to Errors and Expectations, she had strong words (by no means for the first time) for “an educational system that has failed in countless ways and for countless reasons to educate all its youth. Now that we have begun openly to admit to this failure, we can hope for reforms which over the next decade may close the shocking gaps in training between the poor and the affluent, the minority and the majority” (291). Yet the next decade—in fact, the next quarter century—did not see the closing of these gaps. The Reagan years instead saw the coinage of the term “permanent underclass”; with that came a sense that the so-called “underprepared,” like the poor, would always be with us. In that light, what Shaughnessy went on to say seems still more important:

Colleges must be prepared to make more than a graceless and begrudging accommodation to this unpreparedness, opening their doors with one hand and then leading students into an endless corridor of remedial anterooms with the other. We already begin to see that the remedial model, which isolates the student and the skill from real college contexts, imposes a “fix-it station” tempo and mentality upon both teachers and students. (293)

The warning notwithstanding, this is precisely what became of BW: it was institutionalized as the “fix-it station.”

Basic Writing as a Back Formation of First-Year Composition

One explanation for the persistence and subordination of basic writing in the college curriculum is that something similar had happened before. First-year composition, situated after basic writing in the college course sequence, had gone before, chronologically speaking, and in so doing had defined the situation. BW was basically a back formation of first-year composition, itself brought into being to address a literacy crisis, one hemmed about with assessments and the search for quick fixes.

As John Brereton has noted, the pressure on college enrollments was just as intense in the early days of freshman composition as during the dawn of open admissions: college enrollments nearly doubled from 1890–1910, the decades that saw the birth and solidification of first-year composition as a college requirement (7). Most agree that the focus and upshot of this earlier literacy crisis was concentrated at Harvard, partly because of the institution’s stature and influence. And it was rooted in the vision of Harvard’s president at the time, Charles W. Eliot. Edna Hays, in her 1936 book on college entrance requirements, quotes from his annual report of 1873:

The need for some requisition which should secure on the part of the young men preparing for college proper attention to their own language has long been felt. Bad spelling, incorrectness as well as inelegance of expression in writing, ignorance of the simplest rules of punctuation, and almost entire want of familiarity with English literature, are far from rare among young men of eighteen otherwise well prepared to pursue their college studies. (17–18)

Social transformations in the wake of the Civil War had brought a new sort of student (and above all, many more students) to the doorsteps of colleges and universities, including Harvard. And Eliot’s pronouncement on their fitness for college study would have its echoes in what was said about open admissions students a century later. Similarly, Shaughnessy’s belief (or at least hope) that educational reform would eradicate what basic writing was created to address is mirrored in Eliot’s conviction that better pre-college preparation would eliminate the need for Harvard’s composition courses. These courses were, after all, conceived less as college instruction than as remediation to make students fit for college work. Mary Trachsel writes, “Eliot proposed that such fundamental literacy instruction was actually the responsibility of the preparatory schools and fully intended the college freshman composition course he instituted in 1874 to be nothing more than a temporary bridge between preparatory schools and college”; nevertheless, “freshman composition soon became ensconced as a permanent fixture of Harvard’s curriculum” (42). The moral of the story is that structures set up as accommodations for new or changed student constituencies do not wither away but instead become self-perpetuating. By 1894, as James Berlin reported in Rhetoric and Reality, the composition course that was supposed to become superfluous became entrenched as the one university requirement at Harvard (20). Within another decade, hundreds of other colleges and universities had made it so as well.

What could be wrong with that? Well, as Wallace Douglas noted in his now-classic account, that may not be quite the right question to ask: “The interesting questions are those that ask why and how rhetoric in its truncated and debased modern form has been able to survive, and indeed flourish, as the study of written composition, or as practice in the production of written compositions and communications” (99). The answers lie in what happened at Harvard, starting with a president who complained that students came to that institution unable to spell and punctuate correctly or to avoid other telltale signs of being dubious inductees into the club of the educated elite. Thus, wrote Douglas, “the purposes of composition, as it came to be conceived in the latter days of rhetoric” narrowed down to “the acquisition of certain linguistic forms of relatively narrow currency, which today would be said to represent good or appropriate English, but which in more candid times could be described, simply and without apology, as signs of social rank” (110). It was the foredoomed fate of a “brush-up” course to perform a narrower function than opening up the full range of rhetorical possibilities; if this didn’t dumb down what instruction in English might be, it certainly constrained the possibilities. And it’s surely significant that, from Eliot’s first salvo to the entrenched composition requirement’s eventual focus, the instructional emphasis was on making students’ writing presentable. The preoccupation of composition (and later basic writing) with matters of form and surface (often preceded by the word “mere” in indictments of this preoccupation) are rooted in this emphasis.

In the 1920s Yale, like Harvard before it, found the need to institute a form of basic writing, designated unapologetically as the “Awkward Squad.” Using archival records, Kelly Ritter examined the way this “course” was conducted between 1920 and 1960. The young men designated by their English instructors as belonging to the Squad, which was not listed in the official catalog, “had no support beyond the tutors who drilled them weekly in spelling and grammar, until such time as they were deemed fit to return to the mainstream” (Ritter 21).

A more serious consequence of Harvard’s fashioning of first-year composition related to institutionalization rather than pedagogy. The implications of the institutional positioning of composition were diagnosed by Albert Kitzhaber in his 1963 doctoral dissertation and were summarized some thirty years later by Donald Stewart, who described Harvard’s impact on subsequent English instruction:

(1) reducing writing instruction to a concern for superficial mechanical correctness, (2) greatly increasing an unproductive and debilitating fixation on grammar instruction, (3) dissociating student writing . . . from any meaningful social context, and (4) contributing significantly to the division between composition and literature people in English departments, a division which saw writing instruction increasingly become the responsibility of intellectually inferior members of English department staffs. (455)