Composition

What do COMP courses do?  

Composition courses, with the prefix COMP, focus on practice and instruction in writing. Special emphasis is placed on process. This includes idea-generation, planning, drafting and revision. Revision is underscored as particularly important—most of the real learning and improving we do happens in revising our work.  

In these classes, you’ll consider the role that audience and purpose play in writing, choosing tools and strategies that are effective for the people and the moment to which you are writing. You will also be asked to practice writing in a variety of genres—that is, not just in the generic five-paragraph essay. 

You will also deepen your information literacy, learning how to find, evaluate and integrate other’s texts into your own writing, ethically and artfully.  

Grammar, spelling, punctuation and syntax are touched on in the courses, but these are not the focus of composition. Rather, these are just a few elements of the complex web of tools we use to communicate.  

Each professor teaching these courses may choose a theme for the readings and writing assignments, but otherwise will be focusing on similar aspects of improving written communication.