Presents a developmental perspective on text construction, understood as managing information within and across sentence boundaries. Claims that the systematicity in non-standard constructions in basic writer's texts reflects student awareness of three obligatory areas of information management in texts: topic management, reference tracking, and…

Outlines four ways the basic writing enterprise has failed: by giving insufficient attention to public relations; by allowing itself to be co-opted by traditional academic politics; by not unraveling the confusion of legitimate differences of dialect with "bad grammar"; and by not taking a more critical and enterprising approach to research. (SR)