Journey to academic literacy: a basic writer reexamines basic writing

Abstract

In this dissertation, I argue that basic writing as a field suffers from a number of problems, including the fact that we are unable either to define what constitutes basic writing or to identify which students produce such writing. This leads to the related problem of scope in basic writing, where seemingly any student, from an individual unable to compose coherent sentences and paragraphs, to one who writes well enough to receive credit in most advanced placement courses, can be labeled a basic writer. Basic writing as a field must either return to Shaughnessy's original definition of what constitutes basic writing and those who produce it, or abandon any pretense of being able to refer to ¿basic writers¿, unless use of the term is accompanied by detailed descriptions of the racial, ethnic, economic, regional, and class makeup of the student populations in question. In addition, I argue that the field of basic writing must begin to take into account the real lived experiences of basic writers. For this project, I have chosen to write a literacy narrative, using autoethnography as the means by which I convey my arguments about remediation in composition studies. Through the juxtaposition of traditional scholarly inquiry with narrative, I hope some new aspects of the history of remediation in our field will be illuminated.