What is College Composition?

Students often enter college writing courses expecting an “English” course that requires students to read literary texts, write creatively, and/or complete endless grammar exercises. But First Year Composition (FYC) does not usually focus on these topics.

Rather than focusing on literature or grammar, First Year Composition (FYC) courses introduce students to academic writing. Specifically, they teach students about writing and composing processes at the college level. In FYC courses like EGL 1010, students think critically, use rhetorical knowledge to evaluate sources, and integrate original research into formal argumentative essays.

FYC courses build on the skills and knowledge students already learned from high school writing instruction and/or pre-credit courses in reading and writing. But the work done in this course and the skills you develop over the course of the semester may be different from your previous writing classes.

FYC courses help students to develop the skills necessary to write successful academic essays at the college level. By the end of this course, you will be able to write a complex, research-based argumentative essay that uses appropriate sources from the college library databases.

Why the Academic Essay?

The academic essay is a genre, or form of writing, specific to academic situations. It is a structured piece of formal writing that presents a central, argumentative idea and supports that idea with clear evidence. Academic essays are shorter than scholarly articles, though they share many of the same features.

Though the academic essay is usually found only in educational settings, the genre of the essay allows students to practice writing and communication skills that transfer to other writing situations outside of the college classroom. The skills you learn to create strong academic essays are the same skills you’ll need to write clear and effective documents for any workplace situation.

Academic essay requires students to demonstrate deep critical thinking skills and mastery of a specific topic.

The goal of most essay assignments in college courses is to measure student learning.Therefore, essays require students to think logically about complex topics and order their thoughts and ideas effectively. When students write essays, they must carefully analyze available evidence and make careful choices about how it can best be used to support an argument. These are all skills students might need for writing and communication tasks in their future careers.

Essays also allow students to demonstrate their mastery of multiple course objectives or competencies in a single assignment:

• Knowledge: the breadth and depth of how much a student has learned about a specific topic or idea
• Critical Thinking: the student’s ability to evaluate sources and synthesize information effectively and accurately
• Logical Thinking: the student’s ability to logically and coherently organize their thoughts
• Writing Skills: how clearly and effectively a student can communicate information to an audience

The genre of the essay may not be new to you. You were probably asked to write essays in high school and/or pre-college courses. You may have been taught the five-paragraph style of essay and feel relatively confident in your use of it.

The essays you will be required to write for this course and for future courses throughout your college education will share many similarities to your previous essay writing experiences. But the essays required and expected at the college level have a few important differences from the work you completed for high school. This chapter will discuss some of the important differences between your previous experiences and what will be expected of you in college courses.

High School vs. College: An Overview

Before we look at the difference between the writing you might have done in high school and the writing you will do in college, it might be useful to look at the difference between high school and college in general.

Perhaps the most important difference between high school and college writing is that in high school, you probably learned a single essay model that was supposed to be applied to every essay you wrote in any class.

In college, however, there is no one-size-fits-all essay structure that works for every assignment and every course. Instead, you will need to be able to meet the requirements of each course or discipline and use rhetorical understanding to meet the needs of individual writing situations. We will discuss the importance of rhetoric in a later chapter, but first, let’s look at some of the general differences between the situation and context for writing in highs school classes and the writing tasks your college courses will require.

Purpose and Goals

High schools and colleges have different purposes and different goals. Those purposes and goals are important to understand, because they have an impact on classroom experiences and expectation.

High schools are institutions designed to provide compulsory or mandatory education in order to create an educated population. Students are legally required to attend high school until a certain age. Teachers and schools are legally responsible for ensuring that students learn a certain level of information, usually one determined by individual states. Teachers and schools that fail in that goal and purpose can be held accountable by government institutions at the local, state, and even federal levels.

Where high school is required, college is optional. The decision to get a college education is a choice. Most students elect to attend college in order to attain the education and certifications need for their future career.

Colleges and universities have another purpose, however. While post-secondary institutions do exist to educate students, they have another, possibly an even more important role: the discovery and creation of knowledge. Professors in 4-year colleges and universities, especially, have a responsibility to discover new ideas, confirm new hypotheses, and add to their discipline. When you hear about new discoveries and breakthroughs in science, culture, or medicine, it is usually the result of work done by professional scholars working in college and universities.

Teachers vs. Professors

Your high school teachers were trained in pedagogy, or the art and science of teaching. They usually are required to have a Bachelor’s degree in Education and pass licensing requirements for the state they teach in. They likely have taken multiple upper-division college courses in the specific subject(s) that they teach, or they may have a college degree in that subject. Their job is to make sure students learn the required material, and their responsibility is first and foremost to students and their learning.

Professors in colleges and universities have more education and expertise in their chosen field. They usually do not have degrees in Education and are not always trained in pedagogy. Rather, they are experts in their field. College professors at two-year schools will have at least a Master’s degree, and professors at four-year colleges and universities will usually have a Ph.D., which requires six or more years of school beyond a Bachelor’s degree. They have devoted a large part of their life to difficult, in-depth learning about the discipline they teach, and because of their education they have deep, complex knowledge about it.

Your professors will often have different expectations than high school teachers. Because post-secondary education is optional, your professors will assume that students are in their classes by choice. They will expect students to take an active and engaged role in their own learning. In addition, college professors are not responsible for making sure that students learn. While they have a responsibility to present material clearly and provide support for their students, it is up to the students to take responsibility for their own learning.

Finally, an important part of your professor’s job is to continue their own work as learners. Professors are expected to continue contributing to their field of study as active researchers and writers. Even as they teach their classes, they are often researching new questions in order to write new articles and books.

Because of these factors, your college professors usually will view their students not as customers but as scholars in training. The general differences between high school and college contributes to the specific differences between writing in high school and college.

Writing: High School vs. College

Most high school classes depend upon the genre of the Five-Paragraph Essay. Your high school teachers may have taught you that essay writing has certain rules. You were likely taught to start your essay with a “hook” or “attention-getter” and to create a thesis with three points. You may have also been taught specific rules about how many sentences a paragraph has. High school students are usually expected to follow those rules and are evaluated on how well they met those requirements.

There is nothing inherently incorrect about these rules, and they probably made essay writing systematic and clear. These rules probably helped you to learn about organization, logic, and structure. These rules also help students do well on the standardized state tests that are required for public school students.

These rules might have served you well on the shorter, less complicated essays required in high school, but college students often quickly realize that the Five-Paragraph essay is too limiting for the longer and more complex assignments required in college.

As we go through the semester, we will build on the ideas the Five-Paragraph essay taught you about organization, logic, and structure, but rather seeing essay writing as a series of rules you must follow, we will learn about how to use the ideas as strategies that are flexible enough to be applied to many writing tasks.

First, let’s take a look at the expectations of college-level writing.

Expectations of College Writing

The work that undergraduate students will do in college classes reflect a higher level of thinking and learning than what was often required in high schools . Because colleges are spaces for discovery and knowledge creation, they train students to participate in these endeavors.

Your professors will want you to do more than repeat facts back to them. No matter the discipline or course, your professors will expect you to think deeply and critically about the subject at hand and to begin developing your own unique ideas and perspectives about the topics. This is why learning to write clear and effective arguments is so important to college success.

Reports vs. Research Essays

In high school or pre-credit courses, most of your writing tasks probably focused on reporting the information.

College-level writing assignments will usually require you to go further. Rather than reporting the facts you learned or discovered, college-level essays require you to insert yourself into the conversation and make original arguments. College-level writing also asks you to make decisions about how to best present the information for the specific context or audience.

There are four basic areas where you can expect differences between the writing you did in high school and the writing you will do in college: Structure, Argument, Research, and Format.

Structure

As previously noted, in high school, you likely learned and relied on the Five-Paragraph essay structure, or a similar form with highly specific and strict rules. In college, those basic forms will usually be too simplistic or restrictive to be useful for effective and successful college essays.

College essays may follow the same basic organizational structure (Intro, Body Paragraphs, Conclusion), but each section is more flexible and complex than high school essays.

Argument

In high school, you might have been asked to write research reports. You may have also been asked to give an opinion or create a thesis, but often high school thesis statements are little more than a restatement of the facts you learned. In college, simply restating what others have already established will not be enough to count as an argumentative thesis.

College essays also use thesis statements, but they require students to make arguments that present a deniable claim that can be supported by evidence.

Research

In high school you may have used general internet sources, Google Scholar, or other online references. While many internet resources are usable for more basic reports, college writing will often require resources with more authority and complexity. In high school, you may have taken ideas from sources without completely citing them or quoting accurately. Often high school students will lift key words and phrases from a source without completely reading or understanding the source in its entirety.

College essays require research from reputable, academic (library) sources. Because your professors are experts in their field, they will likely know when you’ve misunderstood or misrepresented a source, so reading and analyzing sources completely is an expected part of research.

Format

In high school your teachers might not have demanded any specific format, or they might have all used a version of MLA essay formatting. It might have been acceptable to use decorative flourishes and designs.

College essays are usually formatted very simply, without decorative elements. Each discipline and class will have specific formatting guidelines that need to be followed.

Overall Differences

References:

Carroll, Lee Ann. Rehearsing New Roles: How College Students Develop as Writers. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2002. Print.

Thaiss, Chris and Terry Zawacki. Engaged Writers & Dynamic Disciplines: Research on the Academic Writing Life. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook, 2006. Print.

For Further Reading:

The Difference Between High School and College Writing

The Transition from High School to University Writing

Remixed from an essay by Lennie Irvin