We present 11 evidence-based practices for teaching writing to students. These include recommendations for teaching writing to younger students (aged 5-11) and older students (aged 6-18). The recommendations are based on findings from close to 1000 investigations. The proposed recommendations are (1) students need to write, but writing is not…

We present 11 evidence-based practices for teaching writing to students. These include recommendations for teaching writing to younger students (aged 5-11) and older students (aged 6-18). The recommendations are based on findings from close to 1000 investigations. The proposed recommendations are: (1) students need to write, but writing is not…

In this archival history, a college writing teacher and recent graduate together challenge the integrationist narrative of Basic Writing, grounded in "white innocence" and dating back to the 1970s. Joining other studies of physical and linguistic segregation in higher education, we recover the true birth of Basic Writing from 1969 to…

The authors discuss their process of actively working to generate interest among graduate students and faculty to change approaches to Basic Writing pedagogy, emphasizing personal writing and antiracist pedagogies at College of Staten Island CUNY, a large public university. The authors argue that master's level coursework and faculty professional…

This essay describes Open Admissions in the South during postsecondary desegregation, providing a comparative analysis of policies and debates in Tennessee, Louisiana, and Georgia. Statewide Open Admissions policies emerged in the 1960s as part of superficial efforts to comply with desegregation but were ineffective; consequently, they were…

For this essay, the authors provide an "introspective retrospective." A senior scholar of basic writing provides his views on the development of basic writing as one who began graduate school in rhetoric and composition two years after Mina Shaughnessy's 1977 Errors and Expectations. That perspective carries us through the discussions…

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…

I revisit the so-called Illinois Decision of 1955, which eliminated basic writing from the University of Illinois Rhetoric Program and caused a chain of similar programmatic actions on other campuses nationwide. I contend that reviewing and archiving the Illinois Decision as a locally specific act with multiple actors besides WPA Charles Roberts…

Against a Racial Real backdrop, I argue for consciously adopting a sociocultural approach to style in linguistically and racially diverse Basic Writing classrooms. To make this argument, I focus on a multilingual writer named Tejada, who reveals how she had internalized a racialized stereotypical discourse about herself as a minority--a discourse…

While basic writing has made a public turn by incorporating service learning and community literacy pedagogies, basic writers are not often discussed in the vast and growing research on public writing in composition studies. Scholarship on public writing in composition has produced important discussions of the outcomes of public writing pedagogy,…

In this essay I conduct a Critical Discourse Analysis of the language surrounding the California State University (CSU) Chancellor's Office latest plan to curb remediation, the Early Start program. I consider Early Start in the context of what I argue is the evolution of three major frameworks for Basic Writing in the CSU: the CSU Chancellor's…

While a thematic approach to teaching is not a novel idea, the specific needs of the developmental writer and a diverse student body can find the continuity of a theme especially beneficial, and the theme of fear has proven particularly successful. The typical developmental composition course at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University includes a…

The notion that today's students are constantly exposed to information technology has become so pervasive that it seems the academic conversation assumes students are "tech savvy." The proliferation of apps and smart phones aimed at the traditional college-aged population feeds into this assumption, aided in no small part by a growing…

This article challenges faculty members and administrators to rethink current definitions of remediation. First year college students are increasingly placed into basic writing courses due to a perceived inability to use English grammar correctly, but it must be acknowledged that all students will encounter the need for remediation as they attempt…