First-year composition

With the development of digital technologies, student writing has evolved in first-year composition courses to take on many forms beyond words on paper and include digital genres.[1]

First-year composition (sometimes known as first-year writing, freshman composition or freshman writing) is an introductory core curriculum writing course in US colleges and universities. This course focuses on improving students' abilities to write in a university setting and introduces students to writing practices in the disciplines and professions.[2] These courses are traditionally required of incoming students, thus the previous name, "Freshman Composition." Scholars working within the field of composition studies often have teaching first-year composition (FYC) courses as the practical focus of their scholarly work.[3]

FYC courses are structured in a variety of ways. Some institutions of higher education require only one term of FYC, while others require two or three courses. There are a number of identifiable pedagogies associated with FYC, including: current-traditional, expressivist, social-epistemic, process, post-process and Writing about Writing (WAW). Each of these pedagogies can generate a multitude of curricula.

Composition professionals, including those with degrees in Writing Studies and Rhetoric and Composition, often focus on a rhetorical approach to help students learn how to apply an understanding of audience, purpose, context, invention, and style to their writing processes. This rhetorical approach has shown that real writing, rather than existing as isolated modes, has more to do with a writer choosing from among many approaches to perform rhetorical tasks.[4] In addition to a focus on rhetoric, many first year composition courses also emphasize the writing process,[5] and students are encouraged to interact with classmates and receive feedback to be used for revision. These practices can take the form of essay peer review or workshopping. Portfolios are a common way of assessing revised student work.[6]

  1. ^ Dieterle, Brandy & Vie, Stephanie. (2015). Digital First-Year Composition: Integrating Multimodality into a Writing about Writing Approach. Journal of Global Literacies, Technologies, and Emerging Pedagogies. 3. 276-289.
  2. ^ Duffy, John. "Essay on the Value of First-year Writing Courses." Inside Higher Ed. 16 March 2012.
  3. ^ Lauer, Janice. "Composition Studies: Dappled Discipline." Rhetoric Review 3.1 (1984): 20-28.
  4. ^ Bunn, Mike. "How to Read Like a Writer". Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, vol. 2, Edited by Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky, Parlor Press, 2011, pp. 71-86
  5. ^ Donald M. Murray, "Teach Writing as a Process Not Product" The Leaflet (November 1972), rpt. in Cross-Talk in Comp Theory, 2nd ed., ed. Victor Villanueva, Urbana: NCTE, 2003.
  6. ^ "Principles and Practices in Electronic Portfolios." Conference on College Composition and Communication, 2007.