This article traces the history of college writing and suggests a different way ahead. To show why we need this approach, the article historicizes the start of postsecondary English as a paradoxical one, committed to egalitarian ideals while privileging narrow and exclusive English usage. To offer an alternative approach, the article synthesizes…

Investigates whether business executives and business communication academics were bothered by examples of perceived errors in grammar or usage. Finds usage elements that troubled readers most were basic sentence-structure errors (run-ons, fragments, nonparallel structure, and danglers); several usage errors may be in transition to acceptability;…

As a step toward developing appropriate instructional techniques to help learning disabled college students, mechanical errors were compared in the expository essays and controlled stimulus passages (rewrites) of 15 learning disabled, 15 normal, and 15 basic writers at the college level. Analysis of both types of writing samples showed that…