Michael Newman CORRECTNESS AND ITS CONCEPTIONS : THE MEANING OF LANGUAGE FORM FOR BASIC WRITERS

Over the past twenty years, we have come to see that errors are not simply flaws in a text. However, the need for correctness remains undiminished if only because of societal and institutional demands. Yet there is little consensus about correctness or even whether language can be described as correct or incorrect in the first place. This essay suggests a way ou I of this bind by looking at correctness in a sociolinguistic sense. In this way writers' different formal choices provide information about their identity and the identity of the text they are creating. Correct usage sends the sociolinguistic message the author desires; incorrect forms send undesired ones. The problem basic writers face is that their errors send the message that they are not college students and their writing is not academic. Correctness thus has a sociolinguistic role crucial to the field of basic writing and which helps differentiate that field from other types of writing instruction. Errors and Correctness From the inauguration of the field of basic writing during the 1970s, "correctness" has been an awkward and enigmatic issue facing students, instructors, and researchers. At that time, several convergent factors, recounted in Mina Shaughnessy's Errors and Expectations, began to undermine the time-worn consensus surrounding fundamental questions such as: 'What makes language correct or lacking in correctness?' 'How do writers achieve it?' 'Why does it matter so much to so many people?' Now, nearly two decades later, although we still evaluate students' writing in terms of correctness every day, we do so without having reformulated a consensus about what this concept means. Michael Newman was formerly an adjunct in the ESL program at Lehman College/CUNY and the English Department at Hunter College/CUNY. He also worked in the TESl/Bilingual Education M.A. program at William Paterson College. He is currently Assistant Professor in the the Dept. of Educational Theory and Practice at The Ohio State University. © Journal of Basic Writing, Vol. 15, No.1, 1996