Composition I

While no two composition classes are alike – each teacher’s syllabus reflect his or her individual values, and each group of students puts its own stamp on a course – all sections are designed to achieve the same objectives. These objectives, articulated by the First-Year Writing Committee and approved by the English Department, guide teachers’ decisions about curriculum.

Objectives of Composition I
(English 1150/1154)

Improved proficiency in these skills—

• Close reading
• Summarizing a text
• Critically interpreting and evaluating texts
• Integrating (paraphrasing, quoting, and acknowledging) materials from other texts
• Evaluating other writers’ drafts, giving feedback in appropriate ways
• Timed writing
• Sentence-level editing and proofreading

The ability to write papers with these characteristics—

• A clear thesis
• A clear, reader-friendly structure
• Thorough, honest exploration of ideas
• Clear, varied, well-constructed sentences
• Usage and mechanics conforming with standard edited English

A productive conception of writing—

• Understanding of writing as a complex, recursive process involving prewriting, drafting, substantive revision, and editing
• Understanding of writing as a process whereby ideas are developed, explored, and evaluated
• Understanding of writing as communication addressed to a particular audience and governed by a particular set of purposes.

Textbooks

In Composition I, you will work with a reader, a collection of essays and articles arranged thematically.  Typically, teachers assign a set of articles and ask students to write papers that respond to them – offering a critical analysis of the readings, discussing an issue raised there, or using the readings as models and writing in a similar vein.

Readers currently in use are these:

Signs of Life: Readings on Popular Culture for Writers
Sonia Maasik and Jack Solomon
Bedford/St. Martin's

Ways of Reading
David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky
Bedford/St. Martins

Rereading America
Gary Colombo, Robert Cullen, and Bonnie Lisle
Bedford/St. Martins

In Context: Reading and Writing in Cultural Conversations
Anne Merle Feldman, Ellen McManus, and Nancy Downs
Pearson/Longman

The Presence of Others: Voices and Images that Call for Response
Andrea A. Lunsford and John J. Ruszkiewicz
Bedford/St. Martins

Every composition course requires that you buy a handbook.  A handbook is an essential reference:  it not only offers advice about planning and revising an essay, but it will answer your questions about sentence structure, style, usage, punctuation, and documentation of sources.  The handbook used in Composition I and Composition II is The St. Martin’s Handbook by Andrea Lunsford.

A word about the marketing of our handbook:

If you buy The St. Martin’s Handbook new, it will come packaged with a small, spiral-bound volume called The St. Martin’s Pocket Guide to Research and Documentation.  This little volume is convenient, but it does not contain any information that you couldn’t find in the handbook itself.  If you want to save money by buying a used handbook rather than the package, feel free to do so.

But don’t try to economize by selling the handbook back at the end of the semester!  You will certainly need it in Composition II, and you’ll need it when you write papers in other classes, too.  Your writing handbook should have a secure place on your bookshelf, right next to the dictionary.  (The Saint Martin’s Handbook, like your dictionary, is available online, but you have to buy the book to gain access to the site.)

Assignments

People learn to write by writing. Therefore, the heart of any composition course is a sequence of writing assignments.  Teachers develop an assignment sequence to give you a good intellectual workout: you will find that you write frequently and that you will submit important papers more than once as you work through multiple drafts.

In most sections of Composition I, teachers assign several short, low-stakes writing tasks (summaries of readings, responses to discussion questions, personal reflections, in-class exercises) and four or five essays.  Some instructors assign a personal narrative, but most essays involve analysis of assigned readings or other cultural artifacts (e.g., advertisements, films).