This article uses Zak Lancaster's 2016 discovery that academics do not actually write the way "They Say/I Say" says they do to reflect on relations between, on the one hand, facts about academic writing and, on the other, the pedagogical values that underlie and guide those facts--or, put another way, to reflect on how values we may…

In this essay, I examine the sociopolitical consequences of policing plagiarism and evaluating students' ethics within the context of basic writing's longstanding tradition of remediating and reshaping pedagogies, ideological stances, and what counts as academic writing. With the hope of illustrating how we might be more intentional about…

In this article, the author talks about sentence-level error, error in grammar, mechanics, punctuation, usage, and the teacher of basic writing. He states that communities are crawling with teachers and administrators and parents and state legislators and school board members who are engaged in sometimes rancorous debate over what to do about…

This article presents the results of three comparative analyses on forty-seven student papers in order to examine the effectiveness of a basic writing course in developing students' academic writer identity. The course curriculum, grounded in social identity theory, focuses on the core writing concepts and dispositions that promote writer…

Critical analysis of the literacy narrative assignment within the context of the other genres in a basic writing course complicates understandings of the political import of the assignment. While several advocates of the literacy narrative have argued that it has the power of what Jean-François Lyotard has called petits récits, the authors argue…

In "A New World: Redefining the Legacy of Min-Zhan Lu"(JBW 27.2, Fall 2008), Brian Ray revisits the controversy that emerged in the early 1990s in response to critiques of the iconic Mina Shaughnessy made by Min-Zhan Lu. He offers a reading of the debate that focuses on common ground between the two sides through a metaphor of linguistic charity…

How do institutions and their writing faculties see basic writers? What assumptions about these writers drive writing curricula, pedagogies and assessments? How do writing programs enable or frustrate these writers? How might course design facilitate the outcomes we envision? This article argues that, in order to teach basic writers to enter…

Herrington & Curtis (2000), building on Goldblatt's (1995) idea of the "sponsoring institution," (p. 48) showed students' need for a personal sense of connection with a "sponsoring discourse" when writing in the academy. As Herrington and Curtis, as well as Goldblatt point out, these "sponsoring discourses" often come from outside the academy.…

Academic writing is something we all want our students to do well. The ability of our students to use writing in meaningful ways seems to lag far behind what we know they can do. The author introduces a technique to assist in teaching college academic writing. Writing for personal goals is contrasted with student academic writing. The integration…

This article examines the challenges of teaching basic writing today as students come to the classroom with the basic fluency of digital natives but have the same need for learning writing and critical thinking skills that has traditionally marked basic writers. While most basic writers are adept at accessing information digitally, they are not as…

This article explores the particular challenges and possibilities of service learning pedagogy for basic writers. Because a number of scholars of service learning and basic writing (Adler-Kassner, Arca, and Kraemer) are concerned primarily with developing underprepared students' academic literacies, I investigated how the students in a service…

For years, educators have approached college writing from three distinct pedagogies: composition studies, basic writing, and ESL. But now as these classrooms have diversified, mixed, and blended, separated pedagogies are no longer effective. In other words, these three fields (each with its own journals and conferences) have the same common…

The most serious approaches to teaching basic writing in the last 20 years have been framed by the competing metaphors of growth and metaphors of initiation. The growth model pulled attention away from the forms of academic discourse and toward what students could and could not do as writers, and encouraged teachers to respect and work with the…

This article examines some of the tensions and contradictions between the process-oriented, learning-centered pedagogy commonly associated with basic writing and the product-based, performance-centered moment mandated by writing-for-the-community varieties of service learning. Because end-of-term "writing-for" projects cannot provide students with…

The author's therapeutic experience of writing a book about a personal tragedy led her to investigate the fledgling interdisciplinary field of Writing and Healing to see if it holds implications for the teaching of basic writing and also to revisit the debate about personal versus academic writing in the introductory composition class. The result…