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 that “basic writers need to immerse themselves in language in all its forms” (13), including reading as well as writing.
Having reached a kind of adolescence, BW was rejecting as well as embracing influences. One was computer-assisted instruction (CAI), which had seemed to hold almost utopian promise in its early days: the labor-intensive work of teaching BW students (especially about matters of grammar) seemed susceptible to a benign form of automation. By the end of the decade, however, Stephen Bernhardt and Patricia Wojahn would note in their overview of “Computers and Writing Instruction” that, despite this start in CAI, especially for practice with grammar, “growth in computer use has largely been away from drill and practice toward uses as either heuristic devices or simply tools for writing.” They approvingly cite an earlier overview, Mark S. Tucker’s “Computers in the Schools” (1985), as being acute enough to register “the growing recognition that the machine is most appropriately used as a tool—as a word processor, a graphics process, a spreadsheet, or a database” (165–66).
A much greater disappointment was the growing realization that BW research was having relatively little impact on BW instruction. Nothing crystallized this more devastatingly than Joseph Trimmer’s 1987 JBW article “Basic Skills, Basic Writing, Basic Research.” It addressed the question of why, in spite of the efforts of BW researchers, sentence skills approaches still seemed to have hegemony (at least if one judged by textbooks available at the time). Building on research by Robert Connors (“Basic Writing Textbooks”), Trimmer surveyed 900 colleges and universities and interviewed editors at a score of publishing houses. Though it would be easy to blame the publishers for this sorry state of affairs, Trimmer’s research told a different story, an appalling one of confusion, demoralization, and apathy. Trimmer asked how the surveyed institutions identified basic writers: “The 900 respondents reported 700 different ways to identify such students” (4). His results included the revelation that 70 percent of BW faculty were not professors but graduate students and adjuncts. And he found the editors of the publishing houses no less dismayed than he was by the failure of textbooks to keep pace with research: “These editors know what kind of books they should be selling, but they also know what kind of books sell” (6). Ultimately, Trimmer found BW faculty themselves the real obstacle to effective BW pedagogy, giving him another problem to puzzle through. Why should this be the case? “The simplest answer, of course, is that given the training, the incentives, and political status of these teachers, they see no reason to invest more of themselves than they already have in remedial English” (7).
The implication in Trimmer’s article was that if BW teachers would attend to and act on good basic writing research, then all would be well. But the scholarship itself implied otherwise: BW research seemed not only open to question but also truly questionable, particularly in terms of its accuracy and applicability. Jensen and Troyka had suggested that characterizations of a generic “basic writer” were glib and reductive. This seemed particularly true of the work of the cognitivists: what initially seemed rooted in science ultimately seemed to lead to caricature. An early (and, in retrospect, prophetic) argument along these lines was “Cognition, Convention, and Certainty: What We Need to Know About Writing” by Patricia Bizzell (1982). She argued that Linda Flower and others who used theories of cognitive development radically simplified writers and writing, blurring individual differences and contextual complications for the sake of a clear (and fairly linear) account of the writing process. Bizzell called for balancing such a view with the ineluctable complexities of social interaction. Her own approach was effectively signaled by another
