This article presents insights about writing development of urban college students that can be gleaned from longitudinal research that examines both personal and academic histories. Factors in students' lives, revealed through ongoing interviews and classroom observations, influence both students' abilities to respond to certain types of reading and writing tasks and their potential to develop as successful college students. A set of categories developed by Larson is used to analyze the texts produced by a basic writing student in her first 3½ years of college to illustrate the richness and complexity of analysis available through longitudinal research.

Two studies investigated the editing strategies used by college basic writing (BW) students as they went about correcting sentence-level errors in controlled editing tasks. One study involved simple word processing, and a second involved an interactive editor that supplemented the word-processing program, giving students feedback on their correction attempts and helping them focus on the errors. In both studies BW students showed two clearly different editing strategies, a consulting strategy in which grammatical rules were consulted and an intuiting strategy in which the sound of the text was assessed for “goodness” in a rather naturalistic way. Students consistently used their intuiting strategies more effectively; however, errors requiring consulting strategies showed a larger improvement after intervention by the interactive editor. Cognitive implications of the editing strategies are discussed in terms of the requisite knowledge involved in successful application of each strategy.