Teaching Style in Basic Writing through Remediating Photo Essays

Basic writing students enter the composition classroom with a developed system of written English that often includes misunderstood rules of Standard English, embeds dialects from a variety of subcultures, and makes use of rhetorical tropes not routinely valued in academic discourse. Teachers regularly rely on traditional text-based descriptive, persuasive, argumentative, and research-based essays to "rectify" these deficiencies. But what if teachers used multimodal composing as a tool to segue into academic discourse, following the advice of composition scholars such as Mina Shaughnessy who suggests that what makes "good writing" can be something beyond "correct" writing? Or like Richard Sinatra, et al. who insist there is a close relationship between visual literacy and written literacy? What if teachers used the types of texts students spend a lot of time reading, which is what scholars like David Bartholomae and Patricia Bizzell suggest when they point out that students can sustai