Course Description | First-Year Composition Mission Statement

Think, write, rewrite. Imagine “read,” the word itself, thinned out and flattened to a crease of pixels in the digital plane.

Reading is the implicit underline you see above. Reading supports and highlights thinking and writing. A bit pruned, that’s the writing process for an individual. A learning and writing community, an earnest friend, another pair of eyes, can increase the scope of your writing and thinking. First-year composition courses at CCNY teach that writing is recursive and collaborative – you draft and revise toward a purpose, again and again, in a community of writers while reading quality works that add to your person, broader skills, and writing craft. You grow and helping others grow helps you grow. You should expect frequent written and oral responses on the content and construction of your writing. Classes rely heavily on a workshop format. Give as thoughtful and reasoned a response to the readings and writings of your peers as you would wish to receive.

Course Learning Outcomes |

• Explore and analyze, in writing and reading, a variety of genres and rhetorical situations.
• Develop strategies for reading, drafting, collaborating, revising, and editing.
• Recognize and practice key rhetorical terms and strategies when engaged in writing situations.
• Engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes.
• Understand and use print and digital technologies to address a range of audiences.
• Locate research sources (including academic journal articles, magazine and newspaper articles) in the library’s databases or archives and on the Internet and evaluate them for credibility, accuracy, timeliness, and bias.
• Compose texts that integrate your stance with appropriate sources using strategies such as summary, critical analysis, interpretation, synthesis, and argumentation.
• Practice systematic application of citation conventions.

Required Text |

This is a Zero Textbook Cost course. There are links to reading assignments that live online, and I have uploaded assigned articles in portable document format (.pdf).