Solid, flat wall with doorway on one end. What sort of academic writing happens through that threshold?

Overview: College Composition

Welcome to ENG 1030! As plans for the semester develop, this page will expand to include information about each aspect of the course.

This class is designed as an introduction to writing studies as a discipline and to the varying expectations of writing at the college level. We’ll look at how people develop literacies; how communities function through writing; how your writing process adapts to changing circumstances; and how situations shape how writing is produced, distributed, and used.

Along the way, you’ll create a variety of documents that explore—and reshape—your relationship with writing.

Course Information

  • ENG 1030-G03
  • Tue/Thu 12:30–1:45p in CAS 352
  • Instructor Details:
    • Chris Friend (he/him)
    • CAS 325
    • Office hours (appointments strongly recommended):
      • Tue/Thu 10a-12p
      • Wed 11a-1p and 5p-7p

Description

This course teaches you the processes, skills, and strategies needed to become a rhetorically informed academic writer. You will learn reflective processes for developing texts; strategies for critical writing, reading, and thinking; and methods for technological tools for composing. The course provides the foundation on which you will build your writing and rhetorical abilities throughout your academic career and beyond. 

Outcomes

Upon successful completion of this course, you will be able to:

negotiate purpose, audience, context, and conventions as you compose a variety of texts for different situations.

To achieve this outcome, you will:

  • Learn and use key rhetorical concepts through analyzing and composing a variety of texts
  • Gain experience reading and composing in several genres to understand how genre conventions shape and are shaped by readers’ and writers’ practices and purposes
  • Develop facility in responding to a variety of situations and contexts calling for purposeful shifts in voice, tone, level of formality, design, medium, and/or structure
  • Understand and use a variety of technologies to address a range of audiences
  • Match the capacities of different environments (e.g., print and electronic) to varying rhetorical situations
analyze, synthesize, interpret, and evaluate ideas, information, situations, and texts.

To achieve this outcome, you will:

  • Use composing and reading for inquiry, learning, critical thinking, and communicating in various rhetorical contexts
  • Read a diverse range of texts, attending especially to relationships between assertion and evidence, to patterns of organization, to the interplay between verbal and nonverbal elements, and to how these features function for different audiences and situations
  • Locate and evaluate (for credibility, sufficiency, accuracy, timeliness, bias and so on) primary and secondary research materials, including journal articles and essays, books, scholarly and professionally established and maintained databases or archives, and informal electronic networks and internet sources
  • Use strategies—such as interpretation, synthesis, response, critique, and design/redesign—to compose texts that integrate your ideas with those from appropriate sources
adapt and employ multiple composing processes appropriately for different contexts and occasions.

To achieve this outcome, you will:

  • Develop a writing project through multiple drafts
  • Develop flexible strategies for reading, drafting, reviewing, collaborating, revising, rewriting, rereading, and editing
  • Use composing processes and tools as a means to discover and reconsider ideas
  • Experience the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes
  • Learn to give and to act on productive feedback to works in progress
  • Adapt composing processes for a variety of technologies and modalities
  • Reflect on the development of composing practices and how those practices influence your work
explain how genres evolve in response to changes in material conditions and composing technologies and attend carefully to emergent conventions.

To achieve this outcome, you will:

  • Develop knowledge of linguistic structures, including grammar, punctuation, and spelling, through practice in composing and revising
  • Understand why genre conventions for structure, paragraphing, tone, and mechanics vary
  • Gain experience negotiating variations in genre conventions
  • Learn common formats and/or design features for different kinds of texts
  • Explore the concepts of intellectual property (such as fair use and copyright) that motivate documentation conventions
  • Practice applying citation conventions systematically in your own work

Details About the Course

Besides this site, the following resources will help you feel connected as you go about the semester:

The semester begins in September 2024. See you then!