The Composition Program assumes that to be a writer one must also necessarily be a good reader. Further, effective readers and writers acquire a reflective and critical stance toward their own work and the ideas and concepts represented in the work of others. The program therefore seeks to foster relationships between reading, writing, and learning, to encourage thoughtful questioning of commonplace assumptions, and to promote exploration of new perspectives and ways of acquiring knowledge.
Our writing program is recursive in that writing courses at successfully higher levels reinforce, amplify, and extend the developing skills, behaviors, and attitudes cultivated in lower level courses. We believe that the competencies promoted throughout our Composition Program are necessary not only for becoming a successful writer but for becoming a well-educated person in general.
There are two levels of writing courses in the Composition Program. The first level consists of the pre-baccalaureate courses: English 1E, Black Studies 1, Asian and Asian American Studies 1, and Chicano and Latino Studies 1. ALP 145 and ALP 150 are a two-course sequence for ESL students. Students receive full academic credit for these two courses, and those successfully passing ALP 150 eligible for the 100-level composition course. The University-level writing course required of all students is English 100, Black Studies 100, Asian and Asian American Studies 100, or Chicano and Latino Studies 104.
Students are placed in these courses based on English Placement Test (EPT) scores or, if EPT scores are not available, placement is based on SAT or ACT scores, and, in some cases, placement for ALP courses is based on the Exam of English as a Second Language (EESL).
Since writing is simultaneously a communicative act both social and personal in nature, "development" is to be understood as encompassing a wide range of complex skills that may unfold differently for each student. These skills are primarily cognitive, rhetorical, and linguistic. Yet, in order for students to develop these skills, they must take risks in pushing their competence beyond its present limits. Besides reading and writing, speaking and listening should also be integrated into classroom practices because structured classroom discussion can reinforce the kind of thinking and communicating essential to good college writing.
The social and personal nature of writing, and its sometimes idiosyncratic developmental path, make a variety of pedagogical approaches desirable. Collaborative activities, with the teacher serving as coach and facilitator, reduce anxieties about writing and promote social interaction. Individual conferences with both teachers and Writer's Resource Lab tutors also aid each student's development. In addition, class discussions and presentations provide a public forum for students to try out various roles as speakers and writers. Consequently, more traditional teaching methods, such as lecture and exam, may prove counterproductive in fostering writing progress.
Writing teachers should encourage individual responsibility but, at the same time, support student efforts with timely instruction. In this fashion instruction becomes a kind of scaffolding whereby reading, writing, and thinking strategies are first modeled by the teacher and then reinforced as the students try them out on their own under the teacher's guidance.
English 100 is an expository writing course designed for first-year students who score 148 or above on the English Placement Test (EPT), are exempt from the EPT, or have received credit in a qualifying pre-baccalaureate composition course.
The course satisfies one of the writing requirements for general education at this university. It emphasizes academic writing, focusing primarily on analytical reading and writing, and it introduces argument in the second half of the course. The amount of writing completed in this course should be approximately 8,000-10,000 words, with some of that writing completed through extensive revising and informal, non-graded writing assignments. These informal assignments can be responses to readings, for example, or exercises designed to teach a specific writing strategy.
English 100 is neither a literature nor a creative writing course. Its main activity is expository writing generated through inquiry. Inquiry is carried out through various modes: observation, interview, survey, reading and discussing texts and various media, and through using other methods appropriate for gathering information.
The Composition Program defines "academic" writing as texts composed to analyze, evaluate, and synthesize information, ideas and opinions. In serving this function, academic writing creates, extends, validates, and amplifies knowledge while at the same time it tests, evaluates and challenges all knowledge claims. This academic work is carried out in the spirit of cooperation and in environments where all perspectives are welcome and can be voiced freely.
The Composition Program accepts the following description of academic writing by George Dillon, a scholar in rhetoric:
[A] academic writing...marks out a space in which ideas can be impartially entertained, rigorously scrutinized, and openly evaluated on public grounds...[I]t is, in short, not only privileged and authoritative, but good and in some sense deserving of its privilege and authority. (Contending Rhetorics 151)
Students should leave our composition courses understanding the relationship among writing, inquiry, and life-long learning. They should also want to continue to develop their writing skills because excellence in writing usually indicates that the individual is an organized, disciplined thinker and an effective communicator.
Competencies for English 100 necessarily overlap with those identified for the pre-baccalaureate courses because English 100 builds upon and extends skills, knowledge, and strategies students should have learned in English 001. The areas of focus in English 100 are:
The emphasis on fluency means that students are encouraged to write frequently in order to overcome anxieties associated with notions that they have nothing worthwhile to say and that they must get the writing "correct" the first time. Crucial to overcoming these anxieties is the development of an efficient writing process that will enable them to compose informed and rhetorically effective essays on significant topics. This process includes the abilities to generate ideas; to focus, structure, and develop those ideas into extended texts; to revise those texts to fit the rhetorical context; to edit in order to meet appropriate genre conventions; and, when possible, to attempt to publish their work. The Composition Program wants to foster in students an attitude of personal ownership and of pride in the writing they produce.
Students must develop their abilities to discover and invent new knowledge and to think critically about what they read, hear, observe, and discuss. Critical thinking is an analytic process of understanding opinions, concepts or theories presented (in written texts or other media, including lectures and speeches), and considering what those opinions, etc. might mean in terms of their premises, assumptions, logical consistency, and implications.
This analytic process also involves scrutinizing and evaluating a writer's bias, the strategies employed in a given text, the quality and validity of the information and evidence, and what is excluded from the writing as well. In addition, there is a self-reflective component to the process: students must learn to inquire into the bases of their own ideas and beliefs in order to compare and contrast their views with the perspectives of others.
It is essential that students understand that the essays they produce represent rhetorical acts. Their writing is planned and structured for specific audiences in particular contexts, with content shaped to fulfill the writer's purposes and adapted to meet the reader's needs, and the writer's personae crafted to fit the rhetorical occasion. The "audience" students must learn to address is an educated readership that values fresh ideas and insights, informed views, rigorous thinking, and challenges to commonplace assumptions. Understanding this rhetorical context should coincide with learning to experiment with different methods of organization and development, as well as understanding the responsibilities a writer assumes in selecting and portraying facts, experiences, opinions, ideas, and the theories of others. In English 100, these responsibilities should include the appropriate use of outside sources and conventional documentation.
Writers are also responsible for developing a style that includes variety in sentence structure and word choice as well as uses conventions of standard edited English appropriately. Attention to grammar should be viewed proportionately within the context of considering larger rhetorical concerns important for composing meaningful and effective texts.
Writing is by nature a social act. Students should therefore be encouraged to collaborate with other writers and to consider reader responses as they draft, revise, and edit their evolving texts. Likewise, each student should become skilled in offering constructive criticism to fellow writers, and students should become familiar with various resources to aid them in composing effective texts. Some of these resources are tutors in the Writer's Resource Lab, handbooks, dictionaries, and resources available through computer technology. Viewing writing as a social process is congenial to the mission of the university and to a traditional liberal arts view of education whereby students and faculty exchange ideas and offer constructive criticism in the spirit of creating, testing, disseminating, and challenging all claims to knowledge.
