The essays selected for this volume address debilitating assumptions that place both students and teachers of basic writing, as well as the discipline itself, on the margins of educational, economic, and political localities of influence. The collection presents readers with previously published essays that together depict the fundamental and shifting theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical assumptions of basic writing instruction over the past two decades. Arranged chronologically, the essays examine such issues as defining basic writers, the phenomenology of error, cognitivism and...