As the semester ends, perhaps now is a good time to recall what First Year Composition (FYC) can do. Lee Ann Carroll recounts her observations of the value of the first year of college composition, especially in terms of students' other writing experiences over four years of college. While this qualitative study is from a school with a demographic very different from mine, it still is a good reminder that Comp I and II are not "contentless," as some like to argue. Nor should they be abolished, as others claim.
Carroll reminds us that FYC can provide a protective environment where students can cultivate their writing skills without the pressure of assimilating subject-area content. This environment gives students
- opportunities to move beyond high school-based assumptions about writing--that five-paragraph writing is standard, for example, or that personal comments are sufficient
- the challenge to move beyond the popular culture standards for reading and writing
- new "basic skills"--reading and evaluating difficult texts that offer diverse points of view
- practice in locating information, evaluating it, and making sense of it
- the chance to work with new knowledge in terms of their personal experience--to meld the two
- the opportunity to learn and use conventions of multiple genres of writing
- skill at learning to write as an "expert" for multiple audiences
These rather sophisticated skills come in addition to the following that we might all recognize as similar to our course objectives:
- finding a fitting organization
- using paragraphing appropriately
- incorporating transitions
- crafting a controlling idea
- writing effective introductions and conclusions
- adapting a rhetorically appropriate style and editing according to conventions
Work Cited
Carroll, Lee Ann. Rehearsing New Roles: How College Students Develop as Writers. Carbondale: Southern Illinois P, 2002.
