ABSTRACT
The epigram above is taken from Mina Shaughnessy’s 1977 book Errors and Expectations. Her proposal, well-known in Composition circles, is that the means to better writing “often lie hidden in the very features of writing that English teachers have been trained to brush aside.”1 Errors contain a “logic of mistake,” Shaughnessy suggests. While the choices students make are not always appropriate for each “writing situation,” those choices are in themselves not bereft of meaning. Errors, in fact, are something more and something more important than just correctness gone awry. Errors signal the breach of an occulted contractual arrangement between a teacher’s expectations and what writers really do. In that last sentence, the words “occulted” and “what writers really do” mark a conflict, then, of readerly expectations and writerly desires that have a complicated way of reciprocating such that people learn from their mistakes.
