Introduction to First Year Composition
Writing in College
In high school, the process of learning to write is often pre-determined by state-mandated emphasis on standardized testing scenarios and/or state-mandated curricula that pretends “writing” is the capacity to dump words onto a blank page to make a standardized five-paragraph essay in a short, fixed amount of time. To those ends, the immediate audience for high school writing assignments is your teacher or institutional entities. This creates a context for writing that is very defined with very specific expectations and requirements and without much attachment to “real-world” writing.
But writing is about more than that. Writing is thinking. When we write for ourselves through note-taking or prewriting, we help our brains process information, understand it more deeply, notice new patterns, and have new thoughts. When we write for ourselves through journaling, we help ourselves process our emotions and reactions, memories and complicated situations. Writing is also communication. When we write for others, we create connections. We can strengthen relationships or create new ones. We can share ideas and information with another human or with millions of humans. We can share our perspectives and listen to others’ experiences and positions.
In college, we practice writing in ways that push beyond the requirements and expectations of high school and standardized testing. There are millions of ways to write and write well. Writing in college is very much about becoming aware of the worlds around you and learning to write in ways that respond to and move in those worlds. For example, you are about to enter a specific field of study. That field of study–whether it’s nursing or dentistry or fashion design or sports management–has specific ways it thinks, communicates, and writes. As another example, you came from a specific place–a family or community or town or state or country–that has specific ways it thinks, communicates, and writes. In college, we learn to think more and ask more questions about the kind of writing and communicating we do in these different spaces. And we learn strategies for using writing to create connections between people and between ideas.
COLLEGE WRITING IS…
#1: Understood as a Process
“Process” means writing doesn’t occur all at one time. It has stages. It develops and changes and evolves over time as you, the writer, develop and change and evolve your ideas and your ways of speaking about a thing over time. In this course, your instructor will guide you through the writing process for every major assignment from brainstorming, researching, and prewriting to outlining and drafting to revising and editing and drafting again.
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 as retractions and revised editions are made.
Understanding writing as a process also helps us prioritize ourselves as speakers who move in different communication spaces. In some spaces, we are already very familiar and very practiced at how to speak; in other spaces, not so much. Process allows us to perceive our selves as speakers-in-progress as we learn to write in different situations.
#2: Situated in Community & Context
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.
#3: Rhetorical
In the world, rhetoric refers to the power of language, signs, and symbols to move/affect bodies. 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. We will be thinking about relationships between speakers, audiences, purposes, and contexts from day one in this class to think about how we and others can compose texts to make connections and share ideas. In Unit 3, we will dive more deeply into rhetorical analysis and understanding how diverse rhetorical dexterity—the capacity to move and speak with many different people in and across many different spaces—is.
#4: 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.
#5: Researched
In this course, you will learn how to find, understand, evaluate, apply and reference sources. This is a crucial skill for navigating 21st century communication environments as endless messaging seek to obscure, cover, change, or generate “information,” “fake news,” “clickbait,” “viral content,” etc. This is also crucial for navigating AI whose information is often, unfortunately, unreliable and limited. Additionally, in college, your instructors are going to expect you to provide high-quality research to support claims you make, hypotheses you propose, and data you find. In this course, you will learn to distinguish between all kinds of scholarly and popular sources, navigate their complexities, and apply them in your own thinking and your own work.
This course is designed to develop your reading and writing skills through practice. Each chapter in this book is dedicated to a particular skillset, offering explanation and discussion and also suggestions for activities for practicing. This course aims to help you:
- explore the questions and topics that matter to you
- find, navigate, and use sources that deepen your understanding
- speak your message in the spaces you want to be heard
- share your knowledge and experiences in ways that connect with people you want to connect with
“Mastery” or “perfection” of writing are not the goal of this class: both are too narrow. The goal is to build, through practice, skills that help you grow as a thinker, reader, researcher, and message-maker.
Activity Suggestion: 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
