How do institutions and their writing faculties see basic writers? What assumptions about these writers drive writing curricula, pedagogies and assessments? How do writing programs enable or frustrate these writers? How might course design facilitate the outcomes we envision? This article argues that, in order to teach basic writers to enter academic discourse and work across disciplinary borders, we must read them as closely as we would any text and create courses that help them develop the competencies we have identified for all writers. Outcomes for basic writers are powerfully contingent on how we introduce them to academic writing. Even more, those outcomes are contingent on recognizing that some basic writers are damaged writers. (Contains 1 note.)