Introduction to First-year Writing

English 1000 is a college writing course that focuses on the choices that informed writers make when discovering, developing, and revising academic papers appropriate for the given topic.

What First-year Writing is NOT

Because misconceptions abound about First-year Writing, we believe it is useful to make very clear what this course is not. The tendency persists to see writing as a simple set of universal skills that should have been mastered in high school and to assume that, once these skills have been mastered, students have learned all that they need to learn about writing. This is not our view. We do not claim to offer comprehensive, universal writing instruction. We do not claim to prepare college students for all of the kinds of writing that they will do in their futures as doctors, teachers, engineers, and so on.

What the First-year Writing Program IS

Our program is a collection of particular writing classes with some shared expectations. Each section of First-year writing is a particular course, not a general course, and addresses only a subset of all the possible questions that can be asked about writing. Each class, however, is committed to asking some questions that foster students' meta-awareness of writing. Why does this strategy work here and not there? How would you adapt your composing processes for other media, audiences, or contexts? Each section of First-year Writing works through a particular medium (popular culture, science and society, film, civic responsibility, etc.), but all sections of First-year Writing cultivate a meta-awareness--not by claiming to provide all the answers, but by acknowledging the limits of strategies used in one particular context for other contexts. While all college faculty who assign writing address both content and writing, faculty for First-year Writing pick up one end of the stick (writing), while faculty in the disciplines pick up the other end of the stick (content).

The common denominators

Although each section of First-year Writing is situated in particular thematic or disciplinary context and those contexts vary widely, all sections of First-year Writing address some common questions:

1. What's the problem? In every section of First-year Writing, composing is understood as a problem-solving process that begins with a clearly focused problem and begs a system of investigation. Writing, then, is understood not merely as a form of reporting, but also as a medium for discovery and problem solving. Carefully designed assignments prompt but don't exhaust all problem-solving activity.


2. What criteria should be used to solve the problem or make a judgment? Students need to be able to make informed judgments. To help students develop beyond black/white thinking, faculty are encouraged to design assignments that make explicit a theory, method, or set of criteria for making judgments. Perhaps a claim is not all true or all false, but is true under given conditions. What are those conditions? Again, carefully designed assignments prompt but don't exhaust all discussion of relevant criteria for making informed judgments.


3. How relevant, reliable, and accurate are my sources for my purposes? The digital age makes even more important critical reading of sources, something addressed in every section of First-year Writing. FWP faculty are encouraged to have at least one assignment that focuses primarily on a single source (requiring close, critical reading of that text), one assignment using two sources (requiring comparative judgment or the use of one source as a lens for evaluating the other), and a third assignment that involves three or more sources (keeping students' attention on critical and selective use of sources rather than blind pasting together of many sources). Our focus is less on the mechanics of the assignment design (assignments with one-, two-, or three-sources) than it is on cultivating purposeful and thoughtful use of sources and weaning students from "data dumping."


4. What composing choices are available to me? Every section fosters a healthy self-consciousness about the composing choices available to writers: What strategies, conventions, genres, and media are relevant to the problem at hand? When is a given convention necessary? When isn't is? When is a digital medium more effective than a print-based one? When is it less effective? Why is a given sentence construction effective here? Why is it less effective there? This line of questioning is relevant throughout the composing process?


5. So what? Every section offers purposeful assignments that require students to explore alternative lines of reasoning before making informed decisions. Students are prompted to go beyond the obvious by addressing "so what?" or "why?" questions when making a case for a best decision. This line of questioning is relevant throughout the drafting and revision process, but is likely to dominate writing conferences and peer review.

These five questions complement a set of outcomes for First-year Writing established by the National Council of Writing Program Administrators (available here). We do not assume that we can instill universal answers to these questions or teach skills that can be mastered once and for all; rather, we pose a set of questions that need to be re-visited and re-answered in each new composing situation. We believe this is in keeping with the National Council of Writing Program Administrators' understanding of "outcomes," but we wish to emphasize that writing instruction in FWP is situated and provisional.

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