Composition 1 is a first-year required course. This course introduces students to the writing process and to the conventions of written English, teaches students to write grammatically accurate sentences, well-formed paragraphs with clear topic sentences and supporting details, and coherent short essays. Written assignments include journals, paragraphs, and short essays in one or more drafts. This course is taught in tandem with Oral Training 1.

In Composition I, students will learn to: 1) use different strategies for generating ideas, such as brainstorming, freewriting, and clustering 2) recognize and produce writing that has a main idea (topic sentence & thesis statement) and supporting details 3) write narrative paragraphs that are organized in chronological order 4) write descriptive paragraphs that are organized in spatial order 5) write expository paragraphs that are organized in the order of importance/familiarity/time 6) use transitions to increase coherence

Refining Composition Skills: Rhetoric and Grammar, 6th edition, by Smalley, Ruetten, and Kozyrev