Transforming teachers into learners, a constant in Shaughnessy’s pedagogy, but here done quite literally, made the teachers comprehend the situation of students new to all kinds of academic discourse. (176)
Lyons’s account of Shaughnessy’s program is worth quoting at some length because almost all the critical elements of her legacy are there: embracing an inductive approach, urging collaboration and note-sharing, validating and using classroom-based research (especially with the teacher as researcher asking why students do what they do), and exploring the importance of language uses and academic strictures within the academy.
Shaughnessy’s attention to language use in academic contexts is, from some perspectives, the most problematic aspect of her legacy. As Lyons himself notes, “Those who knew her and shared her concern for basic writers were often irritated by the degree of deference she showed to the forms of the academy . . .” (174). Accepting established standards as goals can be a strategic as well as a principled move, a way of stressing that increasing access need not entail a lowering of expectations. Though this was transparently Shaughnessy’s intention, individual intentions can be bent in being institutionalized. And Shaughnessy’s success and influence were not long in helping to reshape her institution. By 1975, when she gave her “Diving In” address at the MLA convention, Shaughnessy was no longer a teacher or even a BW program director but an associate dean of the City University, overseeing the development of assessment tests in writing, reading, and mathematics. This change of venue and position also gave her the time and scope to do two things that would round off her legacy in the few years no one knew at the time were all she had: the writing and publication of Errors and Expectations and the launching of the Journal of Basic Writing.
It’s hard to overemphasize the enormous importance of Errors and Expectations: A Guide for the Teacher of Basic Writing (1977). Jane Maher’s biography devotes pages to the glowing reviews the book received when it came out—including reviews in The Atlantic Monthly, the The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Nation, and The New York Times (197–99). This attention was quite unlike any ever before afforded a study of student writing. And the attention didn’t stop there. In the mid-1980s, Carol Hartzog’s national survey of writing programs found Shaughnessy’s book far and away the most influential text in the eyes of all program directors—not just BW program directors. In 1997, Nancy Myers cited Errors as the one scholarly book reliably recommended for canonical status in rhetoric and composition studies. In 1999, it was the first of five texts treated in a special review section of Teaching English in the Two-Year College titled “Books That Have Stood the Test of Time” (Knodt 118). There are also countless personal testimonials to the power and influence of the book; in a special issue of Language and Learning Across the Disciplines devoted to the history of Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC), for instance, Thomas A. Angelo closes his contribution by saying, “The first and most personally meaningful book I’ve read on writing remains Mina Shaughnessy’s Errors & Expectations. . . . In twenty years, no other book has had more impact on my teaching” (71). What is most compelling about the way the book was initially received and continues to register is that it is seen as a book “on writing,” not some subset thereof, and it exerts its influence well beyond basic writing to composition, English studies, WAC, pedagogy, literacy, and language studies. But what explains not only its initial impact but also its enduring and widespread appeal?
Those early reviews reflect Shaughnessy’s sense that a profound social change had brought a new population to the attention of colleges and those who teach in them. As Benjamin DeMott said in his review of her book in The Nation, “Her work was the kind of work you would do if you were really going to take democracy seriously” (645). Another reason for the book’s appeal is the almost irresistible invitation for the reader to identify with the role Shaughnessy enacts in the Preface, that of someone dumbfounded by the new students on her doorstep who nevertheless learn to cope, even succeed:
I remember sitting alone in the worn urban classroom where 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)
