Their writing was not good enough to get them accepted into Montclair State without the E.O.F. program, and their failures in their first college writing courses only work to continue their resentment of anything connected to writing. I try, therefore, to connect writing to other forms of communication, namely thinking and speaking, that my students usually do not consider themselves failures in. Connecting writing to the associative character of thinking and speaking invites them to view writing as another option for them to use to express their ideas an option that most of them have been conditioned to believe is not available to them. A goal I have set for my workshop sessions, then, is to support the process of reconditioning my students to develop their thinking and speaking habits for use in written discourses. In this way, they may compete better with those whose more privileged educational and economic standings already have prepared them for academic discourse.
Basic writers remain attached to other means of revealing self, mostly through speaking.
While there is certainly a risky business to speaking, the risks associated with revealing self through writing are often avoided by basic writers. By escaping writing, the basic writer continues to distinguish herself from the society that has set her on the social, economic, and political margins. I am not saying that this is done consciously. Their writing has never been liked, never been a source for arousing conversation, and never resulted in good grades. Years of this degradation take its toll, and writing becomes merely something that they have to do to get by in order to fulfill requirements.