A Review of the Basic Writing Text
When Basic Composition was established, the texts included an exclusively drill and practice workbook as well as another writing text that emphasized basic skills such as thesis sentences, paragraph writing, outlining, and mechanical details such as punctuation. The students produced a series of short expository writings that were evaluated heavily on correctness issues.
The original texts have been replaced with The Elements of Basic Writing with Readings by Audrey Roth. This text's introduction states that it is "well known for its detailed coverage of the writing process. . . ." However, a review of the text reveals that it is based almost entirely on Current-Traditional principles. The three chapters that are promoted as supporting the writing process do not. One deals with topic sentences and order, another concerns word choices, details, and transitions, and the other that is supposed to be about process involves revising and proofreading.
The text is "intended for those courses with numerous objectives from mastering grammatically correct sentence forms to achieving unity and coherence in paragraphs, or learning the principles of essay writing." Use of a text with such an obviously current traditional aim will undermine most attempts by teachers, students, or tutors to make the outcome of the course anything else.
The process based/social epistemic training our tutors receive de-emphasizes the correctness issues of current traditional rhetoric, but ten weeks of tutor training is not sufficient to counteract the pressure to support the needs of students in a course that has very different pedagogy. What we discovered reviewing this text began to further illuminate the "failure" of our best tutor. Despite the appearance of a more progressive pedagogy, the new text kept Basic Composition securely anchored in outdated theory and practice.
