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 appropriate goals. And though answers in terms of recent preoccupations were certainly being offered—Lee Odell’s “Measuring Changes in Intellectual Processes as One Dimension 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
