from Issue 1; Fall 1986; Issue Title; Editors: Margaret Himley, Faith Plvan, Molly Voorheis, and Bobbi Werner
    Profiling the SU "Basic Writer"
    Molly Voorheis [skip to the REFLECTION]

    The Syracuse University Summer Institute, run by the Office of Supportive Services, is a six-week, skill-intensive program for incoming freshmen. The institute attracts students with a wide variety of academic abilities and needs and thus offers a variety of courses to help the students meet the academic challenges they will encounter in the fall. The students take math, English, and an elective, and are grouped in course sections according to ability level.

    The Language Arts component of the Summer Institute is composed of English 101 and NAS (Non-departmental Arts and Sciences) 097, a pre-101 course with both a reading and writing component. Placement into an English course is determined by verbal SAT score and performance on the Nelson-Denny diagnostic reading test, a grammar test, and a diagnostic essay. Students can be placed in English 101, English 101 with a reading component, or NAS 097. The NAS course is divided into three sections: the essay level, the paragraph level, and the sentence level. NAS 097 is credit-bearing, though it satisfies only general degree requirements.

    The initial purpose of this study was to establish even preliminarily a profile of the basic writer at Syracuse University through a compilation of data about the Summer Institute NAS students. The initial hypothesis was that a comparison of SAT scores and diagnostic test and essay scores among several basic writers could produce a composite of "the basic writer" at SU that would aid in course development.

    The placement information for nine NAS students was considered for this study. The students, three black, three white, two Hispanic, and one Asian-American, had verbal SAT scores ranging from 300 to 410; the average score was 354. All but two scored at or above the twelfth-grade reading level; one scored 10.3 and one scored 8.3. As a group, the students averaged a passing score on six out of the eight sections on the grammar test, a familiarity with grammar and graphics that was reflected in the relatively few technical errors in the placement essays. The students had the most trouble with the sections on word endings and paragraph organization; however, in the nine placement essays only four students had errors in word endings, and only one of those four had more than one error. The students' placement essay scores ranged from 9 to 10.5 on the 20-point scale used to evaluate the essays. The scores placed these students in the paragraph-level NAS course and indicated that the students would need to work on paragraph coherence and word endings while gradually working up to writing a complete essay.

    What the placement scores do not indicate, however, is the complex range of texts these seemingly similar writers actually composed. A closer analysis of two of the placement essays, for example, reveals a great difference between writers who were judged by the above measures as having very similar writing strengths and weaknesses.

      ESSAY A

      I do not feel school authorities should have the right to search students belongings for illegal substances unless there is probable cause.

      If school authorities do have the right to search your personal belongings, then they are taking away one of your rights. Which the right to privacy. No one has a right to search your belongings unless your doing harm or the substance you may have is harmful to someone or their property.

      If you don't give the school authorities any reason for them think you have something illegal then they cannot take it upon themselves to look for something illegal.

      ESSAY B

      Should a parent or guardian be informed if an adolescent under the age of eighteen requests some sort of birth control device? As I approach this question, I instantly feel that the parent should be informed and in another sense I feel the parent should not be informed. Why do I have two directly opposing feelings to this question, one may ask. As teenager my self, I understand what goes on in the mind of a child when he or she must confront with the ideas of having to use contraception, and in many cases, possibly get in trouble for using it or for that matter, even discussing it in front of a parent.

      I feel a parent or guardian should not be informed for a multitude of reasons.

      First, it is an infringement on the individuals rights. At age eighteen, he or she has experienced the world that encompasses him/her enough to understand what contraception is, what it does, and precisely what happens when it is utilized. At the age of eighteen, most teens are at a stage in their lives where they are just finishing the secondary education, that being high school, and entering the world of college.

      The second reason I feel a parent should not be informed is because it may bring forth wrong ideas the parent is trying to convey. The use of contraception is something that must be utilized not only by todays teens, but by adults as well. To make the teen feel he or she is doing the wrong thing by requesting for contraception is something we dont want to happen.

      A third reason for not informing the parent is because it may bring about feelings of embarrassment and shame to the teen. At this stage of a teenager's life, it is important not to confuse or bring shame and embarrassment forth because it could have a bearing on his or her sexual relationships later on in the course of life.

      As in any discussion, there are allways two views to a preticular question.

      To this point, I have discussed all the reasons why a parent or guardian should not be informed should a teenager request the use of birth control pills, or some sort of birth control device.

      One reason why the parent or guardian should be notified is because at that age, though I stated earlier that teens have experienced the world around them enough; there are still many others that have not, and need to be notified of the penalties that could occur. Part of the parents job while a teen grows older is to advise of the right thing and the wrong thing to do in certain situations.

      As the question asked, should a parent be informed, if a teen under eighteen years of age request some some of birth control, many individuals be it for religious reasons, sexual reasons, or just plain creed, each has his or her own view. For myself, I would have to answer, NO!

    Both writers in different ways are, as David Bartholomae argues, trying to "appropriate (or be appropriated by) a specialized discourse," to speak in academic voices, to enter into the fiction. The choice for writer A is a direct response to the question posed: "I do not feel school authorities should have the right to search students belongings for illegal substances unless there is probable cause." In her second paragraph she presents herself as a kind of social critic with knowledge of constitutional law and an ability to apply fundamental principles to complex social situations. Writer B works his way into what seems to be "academic objectivity," trying to present a reasonable case for both sides of the issue, carefully balancing his assertions until he can conclude with his own emphatic opinion on the topic.

    Writer A seems to be struggling for an authority to lend credence to her argument. The text doesn't take off. The fragment even suggests that this writer has only bits and pieces of the language, only a fragmentary sense of how to develop academic argumentation. In the last paragraph she resorts to the second-person voice, the voice of the Wise Elder passing on advice on how to avoid the problem raised by the issue. Writer B, on the other hand, has difficulty developing even one support for his argument, but he seems much more familiar with the formal conventions of an academic argument. He strives to maintain the objective third-person voice, to employ rhetorical questions, to debate both sides of the question, and to look at the question from a variety of viewpoints. He clearly is aware of the need to build a case for his argument while Writer A is satisfied with answering the question posed with a clear and simple "no," and then going on to provide a Lesson in Life that will allow the reader to sidestep the problem altogether.

    The differences with these two texts suggest a difference in the degree of "insideness" we might acknowledge for each of these writers. Writer B's parodies of the formal argument suggest a familiarity with some aspects of the academic discourse, though he needs to appropriate the discourse as his own. Writer A's fragments may indicate, however, an almost total lack of familiarity with academic discourse, a community to which this writer will need introduction.

      Thoughts on "Basic" Writers

      As I re-read the Reflections article I wrote during the summer of l986, I am struck most by how differently I think about basic writers now than I did l0 years ago. I note that then we still struggled to identify a "basic" population, at least for those students involved in the Summer Institute, with a diagnostic test and a placement essay, and that we identified special developmental sections of writing courses for those students who seemed most in need of writing support.

      We also worked to explain why these entering freshmen might be labeled "basic," and at the time, many of us were swayed by Bartholomae's "Inventing the University" (Journal of Basic Writing, vol. 5, no. l, pp. 4-23). Bartholomae describes "an enabling fiction" that asks students to write as if they were already privileged insiders, members of the academic discourse community. And many of the students we worked with then, and still work with now in the summer program, are not yet able to maintain that fiction.

      However, as I've gained more experience with writers at all levels in our Writing Program curriculum, I've come to believe that at every level, perhaps in every section of each writing studio, we could identify some "basic" writers. Perhaps these writers would score well on a diagnostic exam, or write a respectable placement essay, but they are unable to take on the "role" necessary in each of the studios. I've worked with good writers in WRT 305 who cannot seem to move their writing beyond the formulaic. I have taught 405 students who have difficulty grasping the difference between writing for a professor as a less-knowledgeable student and writing for a lay reader as an expert in a particular subject area. And I've watched students work through frustration as their "good" writing earns a "basic" grade and response from me.

      This article makes me think about the basic writers I've encountered in my own courses, the writers who needed help at a fundamental level, but also those who perhaps slipped through my course without enough attention from me to move beyond a "basic" mastery. At times I feel like I've provided them "an enabling fiction" that might be more appropriately termed a mask.--MV