Introduction to First Year Composition
Writing in College
In high school, the purpose of learning to write is often determined by school districts’ mandated emphasis on standardized testing scenarios or state-mandated curricula that leaves little room for creative exploration of writing as a tool for thinking, for asking questions, or for speaking to larger audiences. To those ends, the immediate audience for high school writing assignments is usually your teacher or institutional entities that predetermine what “good” writing looks like. This creates a context for writing that is firm and defined with very specific expectations and requirements.
College writing, on the other hand, resists such definition. In college, your purpose is to practice writing in a way that invites you to ponder and to push back on the standardized expectations of what writing should look like because there is more than one way to write well. At the same time, you have a professional audience of readers—your classmates, your instructor, and a broader audience of potential readers with whom you might share your writing—who have particular expectations for writing based on the media they consume and who want to read pieces composed with feeling and thinking, that are well-structured, accessible but also backed by credible research. These expectations shift depending on the contexts within which you write; as our individual and collective circumstances change, we find ways to address the new conditions in which we live, work, and communicate. Writing in college is very much about becoming aware of the worlds around you and learning to write in different ways that respond to and move in those worlds.
College writing is:
Motivated by Inquiry
When we write with a question in mind—even if the question is not apparent to us yet—we engage in inquiry. According to The Merriam-Webster Dictionary, inquiry can be defined as:
- a request for information
- a systematic investigation often on a matter of public interest
- an examination of existing facts or principals
If we trace the roots of inquiry back to its Latin origin, we encounter the word inquirere, which simply means “to seek” (Merriam-Webster Online). Through the act of writing, we work through answers to burning questions, such as “Why do people self-sabotage their most important relationships?” or “What do dreams tell us about the human mind?” We may also seek answers to practical questions we find ourselves asking in simple, everyday moments. For example, “What’s the most sought after skill employers look for when hiring recently graduated college students?” or “Why do my best ideas occur while I’m daydreaming in the shower?” Writing is a way we explore and a way we can take others on journeys of exploration with us.
Understood as a Process
It’s not uncommon for college students to tell their writing instructors all about the red ink they’ve seen on the drafts of papers that were returned to them. Equally common is to hear from students that their high school English teachers simply didn’t have time to write many comments on student papers or return papers to students at all. When the paper was submitted, it was a finished product. No further revision necessary. This practice is problematic because it doesn’t teach student writers what professional writers do every day, which is to engage with writing as an ongoing process. Professional writers tend to produce many drafts and work across drafts, going back frequently to retool or overhaul whole sections of their drafts prior to submitting their work to editors for multiple copyediting and proofing passes before going to press. Even after publication, professional writers know their work on a piece is never finished. Sometimes retractions and corrections need to be issued after a piece has been published. Or as is often the case in book publishing, newer editions of a text are created based on suggested revisions or new insights. A writer’s work is never done because good writing requires the writer to adopt a recursive writing process.
Process also helps us prioritize ourselves as speakers and as humans who move in different discursive spaces. With some of these spaces, we are already very familiar and very practiced; with other spaces, not so much. Process allows us to perceive our selves as speakers-in-progress, not just our papers, as we learn to speak in different situations to different groups of people with new knowledge in different parts of our lives.
College writing instructors also tend to value process over product, which means that your process as a writer doesn’t necessarily end after a particular draft is submitted for grading. On the contrary, you might think more expansively in terms of your process as a writer by reflecting on how you typically begin brainstorming, how you move through stages of drafting, receive feedback from peers or your instructor, revise according to that feedback, and then return for additional revisions as your thinking on the piece develops. In other words, just because you may be finished writing one draft does not mean that your work as a writer is complete. We are best served when we think about how our ideas transcend the page, moving across drafts and sometimes even across assignments to strengthen how we communicate with a broad audience of readers.
For an extended explanation of the writing process, please see the Student Resources section of the OER.
Situated in Community & Context
Moreover, college-level writing courses often offer a sense of being in community with other speakers. American literary theorist Kenneth Burke is frequently cited for his description of academic writing as entering a kind of parlor or a room in which people are gathering and a lively conversation is underway. Burke writes,
You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress. (110-111)
Whether you realize it or not, when you write your ideas are always informed by the ideas of those who came before you. Your writing is part of a larger, ongoing community that has been in conversation with other interested community members for a long time. This is true across academic writing spaces and beyond them. When you offer your opinion at a town hall meeting or campaign for an advocacy group, you are speaking with all members of your civic community, present and past. When you log into World of Warcraft or Dungeons , you are joining a community of speakers who together have built a digital, imagined world. When you follow celebrities on Instagram, you are joining a community that uses language and makes meaning in its own ways. In college writing, where we are in community with other scholars and other students, we learn how to navigate the expectations of academic discourse so we can learn to address and respond to each other in ways that welcome thinking, exploration, conversation, argument, and understanding.
Multimodal
Multimodality refers to the five primary modes or ways by which we communicate: aural, gestural, linguistic, spatial, and visual. Think of it this way: If you were composing a message on a social-media platform like Twitter or Instagram, instead of “relying only on alphabetic letters, [you would] include voice messages, images, photographs, music, emoticons, web links, and other . . . multimodal elements to make [your] points” (Ball and Loewe 311). The reference to “alphabetic letters” refers to linguistic communication modes, while the other options draw primarily on visual and aural modes. The key point here is that you would very likely use several communication modes in your post, not just because you can on those platforms but because the combination suits your audience, purpose, and context.
In college, we recognize all communication is multimodal. All communication engages our multiple senses in multiple ways. In this textbook, for example, we communicate with you via words on a page or screen, meaning our modes are linguistic and visual. If you are using a screenreader, you may be listening to these words, which we would describe as an aural-linguistic mode. Most communication also includes spatial modes that communicate meaning: On the page or screen, for example, letters are grouped together as words, with space between them; paragraphs are separated in ways that enhance communication, too, along with section headers and titles. In face-to-face interactions or on Zoom, we would speak these words aloud but also add bodily and vocal gestures that communicate additional information or cues.
Recognizing and engaging texts as multimodal allows us to engage with their meanings and affects on a deeper level. It helps us read our world. Composing texts from multimodal perspectives allows us to engage our audiences in deeper ways, creating more spaces in which we can speak and hear others speaking.
Rhetorical
In the world, rhetoric refers to the power of language, signs, and symbols to move/affect bodies. It refers to the ways people argue. It refers to the ways we are persuaded. We tend to use the word “rhetoric” in a negative way to refer to messages intended to manipulate or “trick” us. But actually all communication is rhetorical. All communication is composed to forward a message and evoke a response. Rhetoric is a thing we are doing all the time. In school, “rhetoric” refers to the study of the power of language, signs, and symbols to move/affect bodies. It refers to understanding how language, signs, and symbols are (consciously and unconsciously) used by speakers to communicate certain particular meanings and how audiences (consciously and unconsciously) respond. Rhetoric is how communication happens, how communication works. Rhetoric asks: What does this text DO? What does language DO?
Because writing in college is embedded in community and context, our writing must also be rhetorical, as in responsive to specific audiences’ needs and expectations, considering of specific contexts, and composed towards specific purpose in relation to context and audience. These interconnected considerations are known as the rhetorical triangle or rhetorical situation. We will be thinking about relationships between speakers, audiences, purposes, and contexts from day one in this class to think about how others’ texts are composed and think through how we compose our own texts. In Unit 3, we will dive more deeply into understanding rhetoric and ourselves as rhetorical.
Researched
Being able to discern between reliable and unreliable sources is a skill called information literacy, and developing this skill in your writing classes will serve you well as you advance in your coursework. College writing instructors expect you to provide high-quality research to support arguments you make in your writing because you have access to library catalogs and databases overflowing with peer-reviewed, vetted information. Google is a good place to start if you need help determining keywords, but many genres of writing assignments taught at the college level will require you to provide high-quality evidence.
What’s more, college-level writing often begins with a research question you want to answer, and the research you find to answer this question will start to texture your understanding of larger issues complicating how to answer this question. Nevertheless, through the act of weaving together sources of reliable research and information, you’ll find that the answers become clearer the more you write. In effect, you will write to learn answers to questions rather than write with the answers already in mind.
Chapters in this book are designed to guide your practice of writing and composition skills so that you can:
- explore the questions that matter to you
- share your knowledge in ways that are responsive to your audiences’ needs
- speak your message in the spaces you want to be heard
“Mastery” and “perfection” are not the goal; both are too narrow. The goal is to create your own toolbox of capacities that help you listen and respond to different communities with different expectations, desires, and needs. The goal is to explore what you want to say, how you can say it in academic spaces, and how you might say it in the world. The goal is to grow yourself as a thinker, reader, researcher, and message-maker.
Exercise: Your Writing Inventory
At the beginning of the semester, it can be helpful to you to take inventory of your past writing experiences and to reflect on how these experiences inform who you are as a writer today. To that end, write a letter to your teacher that answers the following reflection questions:
- How many years of English did you take in high school and/or what types of English classes did you most enjoy? Why did you enjoy these most?
- Which English classes did you enjoy the least? Why did you enjoy these the least?
- What were the 1-2 most important lessons you learned about writing through your high school coursework?
- What genres or types of writing assignments do you remember being assigned? Or what writing-related activities did you complete in or out of class?
- How do you write in your day-to-day life? What genres or types of writing do you engage in most often (i.e., class-assigned writing projects, texting, social media, email)? What genres or types of text do you read most often? Why?
- Lastly, what genres or types of writing will be most useful to you as a student in college and (eventually) a professional in your future career
