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.

Upon completion of this course, students should be able to write polished, organized expository essays (essays that explain something) on familiar topics in an academic way. Students should be able to recognize and produce writing that includes a Controlling idea (an argument that is expressed in a topic sentence for a paragraph and a thesis statement for essays), Organizing patterns (such as enumeration and compare-contrast), and Detailed Evidence (using examples, statistics, anecdotes, etc.). Students’ writing should also include Signals (also called “transitions”) that make English writing more fluent, and the writing should have Original ideas—creative content that is not just repeating common or trite thinking. The writing should be Unified with logical coherence, pronoun reference, and repetition of key elements. Finally, students should understand that writing is a Process. In the end of the fall semester, the students should be able to: 1 use different strategies for generating ideas, such as brainstorming, free-writing, 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, 6h edition, by Smalley, Ruetten, & Kozyrev