BW courses are designed to teach formal written standard English to students deemed un(der)prepared for first-year composition.
In the early work of Mina Shaugnessy, BW is traditionally characterized by texts that demonstrates a lack of understanding of the rules of formal written English, specifically within the context of academic discourse, which may manifest as nonstandard syntax, grammar, spelling, punctuation, usage, mechanics, organization, and clarity.
[5] Shaughnessy characterized basic writers as "those that had been left so far behind the others in their formal education that they appeared to have little chance of catching up, students whose difficulty with the written language seemed of a different order from those of the other groups, as if they had come, you might say, from a different country, or at least through different schools, where even modest standards of high-school literacy had not been met.
Deborah Mutnick asserts that basic writing "signifies struggles for inclusion, diversity and equal opportunity; debates over standards and linguistic hegemony"[8],.
Bartholomae's most-referenced publication about BW is the book chapter "Inventing the University", in which he unpacks the audience and purpose of writing for the academy, particularly from the perspective of students new to this discourse community.
"[20] Mike Rose was professor of social research methodology at UCLA, best known in the BW community for his part autobiographical/part pedagogically philosophical book, Lives on the Boundary.
In her landmark book, Before Shaughnessy: Basic Writing at Yale and Harvard, 1920-1960, Ritter asks readers to reconceptualize the sorting phenomenon that frames basic writing as a course, phenomenon or identity that emerges with the notable work of Mina Shaughnessey actually reflects a much longer history of "social sorting" that has existed not just in open-access institutions but in the most selective of colleges.
By examining the history of Yale students who were assigned to take courses—colloquially called the "Awkward Squad", Ritter aims to help scholars develop a "better, more historically informed schemata for first-year writing programs, one that is cognizant of the role that local values play in shaping definition.
"[22] Remedial education came under national scrutiny in the early 2000s as organizations like Achieving the Dream turned their attention to improving community college success rates.
The Accelerated Learning Program, developed by faculty at the Community College of Baltimore County, is a faculty-driven model that moved students assessed as needing remedial coursework into a college-credit writing course with co-requisite support in the form of class time and more intensive small group instruction.
[30] Often reform efforts start with legislative or board mandates, but implementation is designed by faculty: the California Acceleration Project is "a faculty-led network that supports California's 116 community colleges to transform English and math programs";[31] public institutions in Idaho collaborated to respond to state board mandates to eliminate remedial courses while "retaining agency and individuality of institutions...while still working from common frameworks with shared goals rooted in disciplinary expertise and practice.
[35] Peter Adams released preliminary data showing students placed into basic writing courses at the Community College of Baltimore County had extremely low success rates.
[37] Shor positions basic writing and declining labor conditions for those teaching it as a kind of conservative backlash to the open-access, but is careful to critique the system rather than colleagues.
"[38] Carmen Kynard, like Lu, critiqued Shaughnessy's essentialist view of language, and re-framed the traditional story of basic writing by considering it in context of HBCUs and Black teaching practices.