Cognitive Development and the Basic Writer

Yet another example of these authors trying to qualitatively lump writers into categories. We've read about skilled/unskilled, experienced/inexperienced, and now we see perhaps the most generic of them all: "basic." I sometimes have a hard time figuring out exactly what unskilled, inexperienced, and basic mean in the context that these writers use them, and the best I can come up with is that the authors intend with these words to say "uneducated" without posturing themselves as "educated," meant to mean "better." "It's the people who aren't us," they illustrate through rambling sentences, charts and footnotes. "We know how to write right." Well, good for them.

Diatribe aside, this article is most obviously related to Emig's "Writing as a Mode of Learning," in fact it references the essay as it's introduction. However, this article seems more intent on how writers learn the specific rules and nuances of language as they write. I enjoy the Ryle quote on learning "how" versus learning "that" and I think that idea summarizes what most of the authors seem to be trying to explicate. I thought the examples were interesting, but they seemed to be very rigid in their rules, if all of her exercises are this way, I would imagine most of her students essay come out sounding exactly the same, how could they not. I don't think writing is as exact as she'd like it to be, for example, in the pattern sentence exercise, I could come up with at least two viable examples for each group of words, yet there seems to be one correct answer she was looking for. What does this say to the writers who come up with some slightly different, but equally coherent and correct? Is their process defective? Should we change them so that next time, they come up with the same formulaic answer demanded by "proper" writing? I don't think so.