Composition 3 is a third-year required course. As this course is part of the Comp/Oral series, its main aim is to give final shape and polish the skills of the students in writing. Students are taught to write academic essays in various rhetorical styles including essays about literature. Students also have to be able to formulate and pursue intellectual and professional goals. The course will help increase the mental flexibility of the students and they are required to write a research paper on an independently researched topic. This course is taught together with Oral Training 3.

This course is designed to give students the ability to understand what has been termed “the universe of discourse,” by enabling them to read any particular text, broadly understood as any signifying system, sign, or ensemble of signs, in terms of how this text actively engages in what Kenneth Burke once called a “gesture toward the world.” It has been said, and is generally received as beyond debate, that “the world is a text.” This is the foundational idea informing this course. Discourse takes many forms, but all of them involve human beings’ attempts to meditate knowledge of and agreement about how things work in view of the multitude of human conditions and endeavors. Discourse implies contestation, which in turn implies rhetoric, the art of persuading others that a particular perspective about something is the more correct view. Fundamental to both discourse and rhetoric is semiotics, since our world and our understanding of its meanings is grounded in the use and proliferation of signs: linguistic, imagistic, verbal and/or multi-media varieties.

Jean Wyrick, Steps to Writing Well. International Edition. 11th Edition. Boston:
Wadsworth, 2011.

Handouts relative to course topics.