Beginning from the assumption that democratic education requires us to attempt to educate all students, including those with little experience with academic discourse, this text is a study of what happens when students from diverse backgrounds learn to use language in college.

But in the last few chapters, and in the intellectual autobiography written as the introduction to the volume, she calls her previous work into question on the grounds that her self-appointment as an advocate for basic writers may have been presumptuous, and her hopes for the politically liberating effects of academic discourse displaced. She concludes by calling for a theory of discourse that acknowledges the need to argue for values and a pedagogy that can assist these arguments to proceed more inclusively than ever before. Organised chronologically, the essays in this volume present a picture of how the author has grappled with the major issues in composition studies over the past decade. In the process, she sketches a trajectory for the development of composition studies as an academic discipline.