This article presents insights about writing development of urban college students that can be gleaned from longitudinal research that examines both personal and academic histories. Factors in students' lives, revealed through ongoing interviews and classroom observations, influence both students' abilities to respond to certain types of reading and writing tasks and their potential to develop as successful college students. A set of categories developed by Larson is used to analyze the texts produced by a basic writing student in her first 3½ years of college to illustrate the richness and complexity of analysis available through longitudinal research.
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