Basic Writing. George Otte
of Growth in Writing” (1977) is one example—the most powerful answers were coming from something that apparently preceded (and superseded) both research and practice in BW: mass mandated, standardized assessment.
Richard Lloyd-Jones, in his 1986 essay “Tests of Writing Ability,” makes it easy to see why it’s hard to find much intellectual excitement in such assessment:
The assessment of writing abilities is essentially a managerial task. It represents an effort to record quantitatively the quality of the writing or writing skills of a group of people so that administrators can make policies about educational programs. Tests are given and scores are assigned to individual performances of people as parts of large groups. As a rule the scores then are used in the aggregate. (155)
The caution with which Lloyd-Jones generalizes is telling: writing assessments and the uses they were put to were eventually found to be almost as various as the institutions that deployed them. Little could be counted on beyond the tendency of such assessments to mark underprepared or weak students for BW placement. Questions about how effectively and accurately they did this caused concern and controversy, as did questions about what to do with the students so marked.
Some found BW scholarship less helpful for this purpose than the practical guides for instruction that began to appear, chief among them Alice Trillin’s Teaching Basic Skills in College (1980), Harvey Wiener’s The Writing Room (1981), and Marie Ponsot and Rosemary Deen’s Beat Not the Poor Desk (1982)—all, significantly, authored by CUNY faculty. Wiener’s introduction gives some of the sense of such books’ motives and methods:
This is a book of ideas for beginning teachers who must teach beginners of a special sort—those who are just starting to learn the writer’s craft in any serious and comprehensive way. It is a book about traditional composing tasks taught to “remedial” or “developmental” students, happily called basic writers (BW) now at many enlightened colleges and high schools, which have accepted Mina Shaughnessy’s thoughtful tag. Such students are working to qualify for instruction in the usual sequence of courses. (3)
As Wiener suggests, BW instruction was proliferating well beyond CUNY, as were questions about how BW instructors ought to proceed—and, not least of all, how they ought to define their roles within their institutions (especially as members of a college community that marked them as “pre-college” in terms of whom and what they teach).
The marginal status of basic writing teachers—a perennial problem—meant they desperately needed a sense of common cause and community that scholarship and even practical guides could not give them. They got it in the Conference on Basic Writing (CBW). As Karen Uehling recounts in her history of CBW, Charles Guilford, interested in starting a Special Interest Group (SIG) of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), posted a sign-up sheet on the message board at the 1980 CCCC convention in Washington, D.C. Soon there were four sheets filled with signatures, and CBW had its start (48). In addition to meetings at the annual CCCC conventions, CBW sponsored its own national conferences in 1985, 1987, 1989, and 1992 as well as a newsletter, an electronic journal (BWe), and an active listserv (CBW-L), all of which further the organization’s goal “to provide a site for professional and personal conversations on the pedagogy, curriculum, administration, and social issues affecting basic writing” (“Conference on Basic Writing”).
Another venue for a national conversation about basic writing was the Journal of Basic Writing. Initially an in-house publication supported by CUNY’s Office of Academic Affairs and called simply Basic Writing, it gradually developed a national advisory board and a wider net: the Fall/Winter 1981 issue on revision included such respected scholars in rhetoric and composition as Nancy Sommers, Donald Murray, Ann E. Berthoff, and Linda Flower. Still, publication had been irregular (JBW had produced four volumes in the space of a decade), and the decision to devote each issue to a specific theme made the publication of unsolicited manuscripts on a variety of subjects unlikely if not impossible. In 1986, under the editorship of Lynn Quitman Troyka, this changed: JBW became a refereed journal with a large editorial board representing a variety of institutions nationally. The broadly pitched call for articles, first published in the Fall 1985 issue, shows how diverse and wide-ranging the field of BW was becoming:
We invite authors to write about matters such as the social, psychological, and cultural implications of literacy; rhetoric, discourse theory; cognitive theory; grammar; linguistics, including text analysis, error descriptions, and cohesion studies; English as a second language; and assessment and evaluation. We publish observational studies as well as theoretical discussions on relationships between basic writing and reading, or the study of literature, or speech, or listening; cross-disciplinary insights for basic writing from psychology, sociology, anthropology, journalism, biology, or art; the uses and misuse of technology for basic writing, and the like.
Fortuitously situated at mid-decade, that first issue of the repositioned Journal of Basic Writing represents a turning point of sorts. It was a particularly rich issue, framed by David Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University”—with its famous observation that students must “appropriate (or be appropriated by) a specialized discourse” (9)—and Andrea Lunsford’s forward-looking program for the field “Assignments for Basic Writers: Unresolved Issues and Needed Research.” Also appearing in this issue, and too often overlooked (it is not in The Bedford Bibliography for Teachers of Basic Writing), was George H. Jensen’s “The Reification of the Basic Writer.” Taking his cue from Stephen Jay Gould’s critique of intelligence testing, The Mismeasure of Man, Jensen argued that the definition of the basic writer, like the concept of “general intelligence,” was shaped and reified with recourse to “political and social pigeonholes” (52). The chief villains of the piece were researchers (especially cognitivists) who oversimplified their characterizations of basic writers and assessments that provided a flat and tidy definition of basic writers as distinguished by a certain (low) level of cognition and writing ability. This type of research obscured “Shaughnessy’s most consistent message,” Jensen argued, “that basic writers are a diverse lot” (53). It may be that Jensen would have been more influential had he himself not used what he called “personality or cognitive style theory” (specifically the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) to demonstrate (if not reify) “the diversity of basic writing classes” (62). Jensen implied that what instruments of measurement and cognitive research supposedly obscured could be demonstrated by an instrument of measurement developed by cognitive research; this might seem a coup, but it could also seem a contradiction. In any case, Jensen’s argument sought to explode the ability of standardized assessments to sort basic writers effectively into anything like homogeneous groups and questioned and complicated the characterizations of basic writers made by a number of BW researchers, notably Andrea Lunsford (“Cognitive Development and the Basic Writer”), Sondra Perl (“The Composing Processes of Unskilled College Writers”), and Nancy Sommers (“Intentions and Revisions”).
Interestingly, Lynn Quitman Troyka, the new editor of JBW, was spared Jensen’s criticism though she herself was one of the relatively few to argue for the validity of mass assessments—something she did in the 1984 article “The Phenomenon of Impact: The CUNY Writing Assessment Test.” Troyka had, however, stressed the diversity of basic writers in her 1982 article “Perspectives on Legacies and Literacy in the 1980’s.” In fact, the call for articles she fashioned as JBW editor included the caveat that “authors should describe clearly the student populations which they are discussing,” since “[t]he term ‘basic writer’ is used with wide diversity today.” It was a point she echoed in “Defining Basic Writing in Context” (1987), where she stressed that such diversity means we must “describe with examples our student populations when we write about basic writers” (13). Troyka came to conclusions similar to Jensen’s regarding the difficulty of characterizing basic writers, though her study, based on a national sampling of actual writing done by basic writers, was much more influential. Troyka compellingly established the diversity, the astonishing range, that the term “basic writing” represented. It was as if the term, at least as it appeared in BW scholarship, had little meaning. What mattered was not basic writing but basic writers. That population, in all its particularity, is what demanded careful attention. And this attention, especially in pedagogical practices, needed to extend beyond just writing. Troyka stressed