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 coherenceThe first semester of the course is focused on paragraph writing with a variety of methods of support. The second semester is focused on the five-paragraph essay (introduction, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion) that can be used for basic academic writing and that can provide a platform from which to develop more advanced kinds of writing. Students will do numerous activities and exercises both in and out of class to help them recognize and execute the rhetorical structures commonly found in English composition. Students will also work on sentence-level and word-level difficulties. In order to pass this class, students must be able to exhibit their ability to execute the course skills.

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