Composition

Mission

The Composition Program at Western Connecticut State University seeks to enhance and refine students’ abilities to read, write, think, and research critically so they may become more confident, capable college-level writers and researchers for communities within and beyond the university. We emphasize writing skills that draw on critical reading and thinking to enable students to analyze multiple points of views, to define and support their own positions on various issues, and to make purposeful decisions in their writing for diverse audiences and purposes. Students learn to be critical readers through analyzing and evaluating culturally diverse texts.

We emphasize writing as a recursive process and an intentional rhetorical act. Students produce multiple drafts of their projects and learn to analyze their own and others’ writing.

Our program outcomes are adapted from The Council of Writing Program Administrators’ (CWPA) “Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition” (2008) and the “Framework For Success in Postsecondary Writing [PDF]” (2011), jointly developed by CWPA, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the “National Writing Project“.

• Rhetorical knowledge
  Students will have practiced using language purposefully and identifying rhetorical qualities in composing situations.
• Writing Process
  Students will have engaged in writing as a recursive process through invention, drafting, and rewriting.
• Genre Conventions
  Students will demonstrate awareness of academic writing genre conventions, including mechanics and syntax.
• Multimodal Transformation
  Students will adapt their writing to distinct rhetorical contexts, drawing attention to the way composition transforms across contexts and forms.
• Reflective Practice
  Students will apply feedback from instructor, peers, and individual reflection to rethink, re-see, and ultimately revise their work.

Courses

All students enroll in COMP 101 – Composition 1: Introduction to Composition and Rhetoric unless they have placed out through standardized test scores. The goal for this course is for students to gain confidence and fluency with writing and reading at the college level. The course teaches students how to write for various rhetorical situations in academic and non-academic genres. Through complex readings, students gain rhetorical knowledge as they critically analyze the audience, purpose, genre, and context of various forms; this knowledge is applied to their own writing. Students gain an introduction to finding, evaluating, and incorporating sources to support their own ideas. In addition, students learn to reflect critically on their writing and themselves as writers to encourage independent writing and revision in the future. In addition, all Composition 1 courses will have a Composition Embedded Tutor (CET), a trained peer writing tutor from the Writing Center for additional support. This course fulfills the General Education Tier 1 Writing Competency.

Composition 1 Course Objectives

• Rhetorical knowledge and critical language awareness
• Critical thinking, reading, and composing
• The recursive process of writing and reading
• Development and support of argumentative claims

Composition 1 Course Learning Outcomes

• Understand and demonstrate the importance of the audience, purpose, genre, and context in shaping a text
• Improve their ability to critically read texts at the college level
• Develop writing projects in a variety of academic and civic genres through multiple drafts
• Demonstrate the ability to use instructor and peer feedback to revise their own writing and provide useful feedback to others
• Locate, evaluate, and incorporate primary and secondary sources into arguments
• Reflect on the development of their own writing and reading practices
• Demonstrate the ability to edit and proofread their writing according to the conventions of academic and other discourse communities, as appropriate to the audience

 

Many students also enroll in Composition II: Rhetoric and Research to fulfill their general education requirements. For students enrolled before Fall 2025, the course fulfills a Tier 2 Writing competency and an Information Literacy competency. For students enrolled in Fall 2025 or later, the course fulfills the Writing 2 and Information Literacy (WIL) Learning Area.

COMP 2 is a course dedicated to curiosity: formulating questions, tracking down answers, and writing the results using credible, intentional sources. Students practice the forms, styles, and motivations for research writing from an inquiry perspective. The course builds on the composing skills, rhetorical strategies, and source-supported arguments learned in COMP 101 Composition I. This course is appropriate for all majors.

Composition 2 Course Learning Outcomes

Students completing the WIL requirement will be able to …

• Demonstrate facility in writing with research as a process that includes revision in response to instructor/peer feedback;
• Use appropriate information technologies to conduct research, complete inquiry-based projects, and make informed decisions;
• Understand the economic, ethical, legal, and social issues associated with the ownership, access, and use of information; and
• Demonstrate the ability to locate, analyze, synthesize, incorporate, and attribute primary and secondary sources appropriate to goal(s) and audience(s).

Also housed in the World Languages and Composition Department are COMP 201: Academic Resources and Citation; COMP 337: Teaching Writing in the Elementary Schools; and COMP 347: Teaching Writing in the Secondary Schools.