In this Chapter
- What is College Composition?
- Why the Academic Essay?
- High School vs. College: An Overview
- Purposes and Goals
- Teachers vs. Professors
- Expectations of College Writing
- Structure
- Argument
- Research
- Format
What is College Composition?
Students often enter college writing courses expecting an “English” course that requires students to read literary texts, write creatively, and/or complete endless grammar exercises. But First Year Composition (FYC) does not usually focus on these topics.
Rather than focusing on literature or grammar, First Year Composition (FYC) courses introduce students to academic writing. Specifically, they teach students about writing and composing processes at the college level. In FYC courses like EGL 1010, students think critically, use rhetorical knowledge to evaluate sources, and integrate original research into formal argumentative essays.
FYC courses build on the skills and knowledge students already learned from high school writing instruction and/or pre-credit courses in reading and writing. But the work done in this course and the skills you develop over the course of the semester may be different from your previous writing classes.
FYC courses help students to develop the skills necessary to write successful academic essays at the college level. By the end of this course, you will be able to write a complex, research-based argumentative essay that uses appropriate sources from the college library databases.
Why the Academic Essay?
The academic essay is a genre, or form of writing, specific to academic situations. It is a structured piece of formal writing that presents a central, argumentative idea and supports that idea with clear evidence. Academic essays are shorter than scholarly articles, though they share many of the same features.
Though the academic essay is usually found only in educational settings, the genre of the essay allows students to practice writing and communication skills that transfer to other writing situations outside of the college classroom. The skills you learn to create strong academic essays are the same skills you’ll need to write clear and effective documents for any workplace situation.
Academic essay requires students to demonstrate deep critical thinking skills and mastery of a specific topic.
The goal of most essay assignments in college courses is to measure student learning.Therefore, essays require students to think logically about complex topics and order their thoughts and ideas effectively. When students write essays, they must carefully analyze available evidence and make careful choices about how it can best be used to support an argument. These are all skills students might need for writing and communication tasks in their future careers.
Essays also allow students to demonstrate their mastery of multiple course objectives or competencies in a single assignment:
- Knowledge: the breadth and depth of how much a student has learned about a specif