College Writing
The University of Massachusetts Amherst requires two general education writing courses of all undergraduates: Englwrit 112: College Writing, an introductory course to the academic writing process, and Junior Year Writing, an advanced course in the student’s major, focused on the writing of that field and taught by faculty in that discipline.
College Writing Objectives
Engwrit 112: College Writing provides students the opportunity to:
- Build awareness of the intersections of writing, language, and power.
- Develop effective composing processes to use in future writing contexts.
- Create projects which demonstrate student agency in the process of making composing choices.
- Explicitly include and sustain culturally and linguistically diverse approaches to writing.
- Implement strategies to develop complex ideas while discovering new ones in the composing process.
- Explore connections between personal, creative, and critical composition practices.
- Take part in composing projects which cross conventional borders of argumentation, language use, and genre.
College Writing Learning Outcomes
By writing, reading, and engaging in discussion across four units, you will be able to:
- Write for more than one purpose and audience in more than one mode, media, or genre.
- Use the writing process to substantially revise your thinking, in which your understanding of an idea evolves or extends.
- Synthesize ideas and claims from personal, academic, public, or professional texts.
- Analyze the intention, meaning, or effect of personal, academic, public, or professional texts.
- Make effective rhetorical choices during revision.
- Use citation practices that represent diverse sources of information and acknowledgement of intellectual property.
- Show in written reflection which writing strategies you will apply beyond the course.
Course Texts
All College Writing students are required to come to class with three texts. Students should purchase two of the required texts through the e-campus online bookstore:
- Hoang, Haivan V., et al., eds. Opening Conversations: A Writer’s Reader. Hayden-McNeil Publishing, 2015. | ISBN (print): 9780738080215 | ISBN (ebook): 978-1-5339-3240-2: An anthology of published essays custom designed for the UMass Amherst Writing Program.
- Lunsford, Andrea A. EasyWriter. 7e ed. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2019. ISBN (print): 978-1319361440 | ISBN (ebook): 9781319370381 | Edition: 7e: A style manual.
The third required text is The Student Writing Anthology, an open-access digital collection of student compositions from the UMass Amherst Writing Program, which is accessed online for free.