Abstract

That errors in writing are somehow is no news to the field of composition. Yet there is a recurring discrepancy in the approach compositionists take toward this dimension of written error. On the one hand, what counts as an (or as correct) in writing is generally recognized as social: most compositionists freely acknowledge the of the controversial imposition of standards of correct notation as a set of arbitrary conventions. On the other hand, the production of particular errors is regularly identified and treated as social but as individual, evidence of an individual writer's cognitive or perceptual difficulties, trouble knowing and/or seeing error. We might account cynically for the discrepancy between recognition of what might be called the sociality of errors and the focus of research and teaching on error as a sign of ethical irresponsibility. I would argue, however, that this discrepancy results from an impasse in how the sociality of error has been theorized. To acknowledge that errors are seems to mean primarily that one acknowledges the of the regularization of conventions for writing English, a regularization which, coincidentally, has favored the syntactic forms of dialects spoken by more powerful social groups. But all this seems to be viewed as afait accompli, history in the sense of something in the past about which there is little now to be done, a digression that takes attention away from the immediate problems of our students and their writing. The proper focus of attention for researchers and teachers of writing, it seems largely to be assumed, is on matters of student cognition and perception of error. In her 1985 review of Research on Error and Correction, Glynda Hull testifies to this state of affairs. Hull acknowledges that [m]ost of the controversy correctness in writing has finally to do with power, status, and class, but observes that much recent research on error can be viewed as walking a middle ground in the controversy, neither despairing that students must learn a privileged language nor grieving overlong that there is a cost (165, 166). This research takes as its purpose not a delineation of the social and political implications of error and correctness but an investigation of those mental processes involved in making errors and correcting them (167).1 Note that researchers pursuing such matters do deny the social controversy surrounding errors. But