The End of Composition

In my opinion, the first end of college composition is that, when a student leaves the classroom, they are able to write appropriately in the various academic and real-world contexts that they mayface in the future.

I do like the idea of one freshman English class that every student takes. That sort of class is a good introduction to the basics of writing and reading at the collegiate level. The second semester of freshman English (1302) should be more specialized. We could offer classes in academic writing, for people who may go into the academy, business writing, technical writing, or science writing, just to name a few of the options. This might make students feel better about having to take a required classs--at least it would be immediately clear how it will be valuable to their lives.

There are of course many other ends of a composition class. One important one that has been a hot topic on the ICON listserve this week is tone. I want any student who leaves a class that I teach to learn the importance of taking the correct tone for each assignment. One can be informal and joke around in a movie review, but you can't talk to a teacher or a boss in an informal manner like the student on the listserve did this week.

Another end is the basics of grammar. Leaving composition class, even if a student doesn't have the best grasp on the grammatical subtleties of the English language, I want them to at least know how to go about finding answers to their questions. A positive of the 1301 class is that it does require the St. Martin's Handbook, so each student can see the value in a handbook like this for solving grammatical questions.

The last major end is critical reading. I firmly believe that in order to write well, one must read well. If you don't understand the assignment you are working on, or if you misunderstand a source that you are using in a research paper, you will never do well. The skill of critical reading is one of the most important and most easily transferable skills that we need to teach in the college composition class.