Rethinking Basic Writing: Exploring Identity, Politics, and Community in interaction

by Laura Gray-Rosendale

This book surveys the history of basic writing scholarship, suggesting that we cannot adequately theorize the situations of basic writers unless we examine how they construct their own conceptions of their identities, their constructions of their relationships to social forces, and their representations of their relationships to written work. Using a cross-disciplinary analytic model, Gray-Rosendale offers a detailed examination of the oral conversations that take place within one basic writing peer revision group. She explains the ways in which the students' own conversational structures impact and shape their written products. Gray-Rosendale then draws out the potentials of her work for basic writing administrators, curricula builders, and teachers.

206 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1999

About the author

Dr. Laura Gray-Rosendale is a President's Distinguished Teaching Fellow and a Professor of English at Northern Arizona University where she also directs a Writing Program for "at risk" freshmen college students. Laura's areas of interest include creative nonfiction, popular culture, rhetorical history, philosophy theory, and gender studies. She is an avid animal lover, trail runner (and a sometimes mountain biker.)