ABSTRACT
While the 1960s open-access movement led to increasingly diverse universities, Patricia Bizzell came to believe that academic discourse was still controlled by the dominant culture and was therefore antagonistic to other forms of discourse and their practitioners. In her influential article “Cognition, Convention and Certainty” (1982), she challenges the belief that academic discourse is inherently superior and urges teachers to empower students, particularly basic writers, by teaching them academic discourse as a set of conventions that comprise one kind of discourse rather than treating such conventions “as if they simply mirrored reality.” 1
