EIU First-Year Composition

Welcome to First-Year Composition

EIU’s First-Year Composition courses engage and challenge students to conduct college-level research and writing. The courses, ENG 1001G and 1002G, focus on students writing informative, analytical, evaluative, persuasive, and argumentative writing projects

These courses approach writing as a refined medium of expression to engage with challenging and important ideas. The First-Year Composition courses prepare students to analyze and write from critical perspectives. Both courses focus on the careful, critical reading demanded by the academy, and writing projects should reflect a diversity of purposes, genres, and rhetorical situations.

Learning Objectives:

In the First-Year Composition courses, writers are challenged to demonstrate the following abilities:

• To develop effective writing processes for creating writing projects that inform, analyze, evaluate, persuade, and argue
• To develop the ability to write effective prose with strong support, research, reasoning, and evidence
• To integrate sources ethically, appropriately, and consistently in documents
• To revise writing projects by participating in workshops, peer review, and writing conferences
• To transfer their writing processes, understanding of rhetorical principles, and genre awareness to other future writing situations

Learning Outcomes:

Rhetorical Principles

By taking First-Year Composition courses, students get essential practice composing texts of various rhetorical aims and genres. The goal is to have students take on a rhetorical mindset and demonstrate their understanding of audience, purpose, and context.

Critical Thinking

By undertaking scholarly inquiry, students produce writing projects that will summarize, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate others’ ideas. Students will learn ethical and effective ways to integrate other texts into their work. In sum, students should engage in deep learning and push themselves to look beyond the obvious.

The Writing Process

Starting with prewriting activities such as brainstorming, note taking, and mapping ideas, the writing process involves constant revision of ideas, reconstruction of sentences, and organization of thoughts. Throughout the writing process, students will learn to apply rhetorical elements skillfully and polish their writing as they revise and refine their work by getting rid of all major and minor errors. The writing process will also enable the students to refine their work through constant self-evaluation.

Helpful Resources:

• Course Descriptions 
• Resources for Writers
• Tips for Editing and Proofreading
• Important Points About Revision
• ENG 1001 Challenge Essay