Before Shaughnessy: Basic Writing at Yale and Harvard, 1920-1960

Studies in Writing and Rhetoric

by Kelly Ritter

In Before Basic Writing at Yale and Harvard, 1920–1960 , Kelly Ritter uses materials from the archives at Harvard and Yale and contemporary theories of writing instruction to reconsider the definition of basic writing and basic writers within a socio-historical context. Ritter challenges the association of basic writing with only poorly funded institutions and poorly prepared students. Using Yale and Harvard as two sample case studies, Ritter shows that basic writing courses were alive and well, even in the Ivy League, in the early twentieth century.  She argues not only that basic writers exist across institutional types and diverse student populations, but that the prevalence of these writers has existed far more historically than we generally acknowledge. Uncovering this forgotten history of basic writing at elite institutions, Ritter contends that the politics and problems of the identification and the definition of basic writers and basic writing began long before the work of Mina Shaughnessy in Errors and Expectations and the rise of open admissions. Indeed, she illustrates how the problems and politics have been with us since the advent of English A at Harvard and the heightened consumer-based policies that resulted in the new admissions criteria of the early twentieth-century American university. In order to recognize this long-standing reality of basic writing, we must now reconsider whether the nearly standardized, nationalized definition of “basic” is any longer a beneficial one for the positive growth and democratic development of our first-year writing programs and students.    

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Lance · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ritter does a great job of examining how Basic Writing mechanisms can exist without the actual term, showing how Foucault's Panopticon is a work within the traditional university system. The strongest chapter is the one on Harvard, mostly because she has the most archival material. I would have liked to have seen more of a focus on this; an entire book could be written on this. In addition, Ritter contextualizes her work well within the work of other composition historians and theorists, making her argument clear and compelling.

[Jonna Higgins-Freese · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think the author was trying to make an important point, though I confess I couldn't exactly grasp it through all the academic-ese. As best I could tell, the point was: academics have always felt that incoming college students lacked the writing abilities necessary to produce the kind of writing necessary at their institutions, through time and even at elite institutions like Yale and Harvard. I took from it that developmental education is not a new phenomenon, nor is it likely to go away.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating book--spotlights the subjectivity of "basic writing" in any time and place. This subjectivity is especially visible at institutions like Yale and Harvard. The writing style is occasionally over academic with hard to decipher long, complicated clauses. Would have liked more clarity and more story.

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ritter uses her research in the archives of Yale and Harvard universities to show that courses targeting "basic" writers existed long before Mina Shaughnessy and Open Admissions at CUNY in the 1970s. A particularly pointed and urgent archival history.