Abstract
shot through as the term is with local contexts, different approaches, and standardized grammar tests. Any article or research report on writing has to be read carefully for how its author describes writing. are equally elusive. Sometimes they are called remedial, implying that they are retaking courses in material that already should have been mastered. Sometimes they are called developmental, suggesting a cognitive or psychological problem. At other times and in other places, they may be called Educational Opportunity Students, suggesting division by access to education. Or they are just basic, requiring foundational or fundamental instruction in writing. As a case in point, several years ago, I wrote an article, on the writing program at Indiana UniversityIndianapolis, published in the Journal of Basic Writing. Impossibly, it seemed to me, I found an article on Harvard University's writers in the same issue in which my own article appeared. Surely, we weren't talking about the same students, nor the same writing. And, indeed, we were not. While the students I wrote about were having trouble producing any text, even text with attendant problems in organization and mechanics, the Harvard students were instead having problems with originality, creativity, and elaborating arguments (Armstrong 70-72). Yet the presence of basic is tenacious in English departments and we might want to ask ourselves why the term-which seems only to give some vague indication of a deficiency-continues to signify something important to us. The signification of the term is often masked by the way basic is