Welcome to College Composition

Nobody majors in College Composition. Why is that?

The homework is one possible answer: there tends to be a lot of it, and it tends to require a different kind of engagement than the homework you might do in your other classes. For instance, when asked to simply read from a history textbook, you need only remember key information. And in disciplines like math, there’s typically a clear right or wrong answer. But with writing, there is no clear path–no prescription telling you exactly what to say or how to say it. Instead, you have to wrestle with the material, and you have to push yourself to think thoughts that nobody has ever thought before.

But the main reason that nobody majors in College Composition is likely that with the exception of torturing students teaching, there’s no career in it. Honestly, when is the last time you heard a parent or friend say to someone, “Hey, I have some College Composition work I need done. Do you know anybody who does a good job and won’t overcharge me?”

So why are you here? Why are you spending time on something that requires about as much effort as anything else you will do in college? There are two reasons:

First, nearly every other major in college will require writing. That idea is an easy sell for text-heavy disciplines like history, psychology, religion, etc.. But for those of you math types—who see numbers as truth and the words that surround them as fluffy stuff—it can be a bit tougher to see how the ability to write well is necessary for you to succeed in your courses. We must admit that at first, it might not be. But as you progress through your major, you will find that writing becomes an increasingly integral part of your work—the part where you explain to us numbers-impaired folks what all those crazy equations mean and why we should care about them. Similarly, you aspiring engineers will have to explain how your work can be lucrative to investors, just as you cyber-security folks will need to convince your clients that you know what you’re doing.

The second (and more important) reason that you are here has to do with what makes writing such an energy-consuming task in the first place: writing the way you will be expected to write in this course requires creating knowledge and perspective that is new, which means going beyond memorizing facts, repeating the perspectives of experts, or regurgitating what your teacher said the day before. It means transitioning from passively consuming information to actively constructing it—from being on the receiving end of the knowledge that others have created to being a creator of knowledge yourself. All majors in college share this central aim for you to transition from simply learning about their discipline to actually contributing to it, though it may not be apparent in your first and second-year courses. And that is why you are here: to learn to become a critical contributor to a knowledge-making community, a quality that you will need, not only to succeed in your chosen major, but also to succeed in your chosen profession, and more broadly, to contribute to society actively and constructively. In a sense, it is less accurate to say that nobody majors in College Composition and more accurate to say that everyone does.

And so, the emphasis in this course won’t be learning how to construct grammatically-correct sentences (though grammar is part of it), nor will it be learning how to write the perfect five-paragraph essay (honestly, you can forget everything you’ve learned about those); instead, the emphasis will be learning how to contribute to a knowledge-making community—communities like the ones you will encounter in your other courses, regardless of discipline, but which you will also encounter in the professional and civic contexts you hope to be a part of after you leave college. In a nutshell, you are here to learn how to use the writing process to create knowledge and perspective that is useful to you and others. 

Attributions

“Introduction” by Sarah Johnson, Beth Caruso, and Nic Learned is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Please note that the cover art for this textbook was created by CAC Student Taylor Slaughter: “I’ve been learning & practicing Graphic Design for almost 7 years now and have been working professionally as a Junior Graphic Artist for just over 1 year while attending Central Arizona College in pursuit of an Associate of Applied Science in Graphic Design. My small amounts of free time are spent on my computer designing mockup designs for companies that don’t exist, just for fun. My end goal is to become the Creative Director at a design agency, or alternatively, to run my own successful design business.”