Who Are Basic Writers?
Beginning with Mina Shaughnessy's Errors and Expectations, basic writing researchers have sought to answer several questions about basic writers: Do students who are labeled as basic writers share characteristics or qualities? Do scores on placement measures indicate whether students are prepared for college writing? Along with Shaughnessy's foundational text, many of the bibliography's other articles and books address these questions as well.
Like Errors and Expectations, some work seeks to define the characteristics associated with basic writers. More recently, however, some authors of early works have reconsidered these definitions, even questioning whether they are harmful to students. Adams's article "Basic Writing Reconsidered," for example, explores whether the basic writer label becomes a controlling feature in students' work. Hilgers's "Basic Writing Curricula and Good Assessment Practices" echoes this sentiment, arguing that students often are defined as basic writers because of the work that they do on problematic assessment measures.
Other works-like "Remediation as Social Construct" (Hull, Rose, Fraser, and Castellano), "Defining Basic Writing in Context" (Troyka), "Redefining the Legacy of Mina Shaughnessy" (Lu), and "Literacies and Deficits Revisited" (Scott)-suggest that definitions of basic writers often stem from deficit models that ultimately marginalize students' literacies in the face of academic discourse.