Each year, the award-winning Writing Program of John Jay College services approximately XXXX students, across XXX sections for first-year composition. We work with XXX part-time and xx full-time faculty members, to teach these courses, who come with backgrounds in X, X, and X, (etc.)

The first-year writing sequence is designed to first introduce students to narrative and inquiry-based research processes, in English 101, and then allow them to further implement the tools practiced in multi-disciplinary writing projects, in English 201.

Some students entering our institution are placed out of the first-year writing courses, as per AP credit, pre-college coursework, and/or writing placement exam scores. More is explained about this under Student Placement.

ENG 101  Composition I – Exploration and Authorship: An Inquiry-based Writing Course

This course introduces students to the skills, habits, and conventions necessary to prepare inquiry-based research for college. While offering students techniques and practices of invention and revision, this theme-based composition course teaches students the expectations of college-level research, academic devices for exploring ideas, and rhetorical strategies for completing investigative writing. Students prepare a sequence of prescribed assignments that culminate in a final research paper. These assignments provide small manageable tasks that scaffold the process of the normally overwhelming research paper. Students complete a semester ending portfolio, part of which involves reflecting on their writing and their development as writers and critical thinkers over the course of the semester.

The first-semester writing course offers students strategic points of departure for research and writing, relying on their already learned writing sufficiencies as well as identifying their literacy “misbehaviors” which may be counterproductive to their success at college-level writing.  The prescribed assignments allow ample opportunities for instructors to identify students’ writing strengths and stumbles. 

While instructors are free to choose the theme and readings for their courses, they follow a prescribed series of assignments that each student completes for a final portfolio.  Instructors choose the content and readings that interest them in hopes that they will instill this same investment in their students. 

Throughout the semester, the instructor presents techniques and strategies that will help students both decipher texts and well as compose their own.  The inquiry-based paper (a. k. a., the research paper) is the semester-long endeavor of this course. In lieu of assigning this specifically academic genre three weeks before the end of the semester and saying, “Get ready, get set, go,” instructors assign a mandated sequence of step-by-step writing tasks that collectively inform the essay-composing process as well as motivates students to explore the topic and its formulation into words. In other words by composing a sequence of interrelated assignments, students explore how the contents of written academic papers are invented, organized, researched, articulated, and presented.  They then compile these various pieces of writing plus a final culminating inquiry-based project into a portfolio; they earn their grade based on the contents of this writing portfolio.  

Prescribed English 101 Assignmnents

• A Descriptive Letter or piece of Creative Non-fiction that addresses the theme of the course.
• A Proposal that opens up an investigative question
• An Annotated Bibliography that identifies the expert discourse that has been previously studied by other authors and resources
• A First Draft that messily lays out students’ ideas about their proposed topic
• A Working Outline that designates the organization of their developing paper
• A Scripted Interview that asks students to choose two authors they cite in their essay and compose a hypothetical interview.  Acting as a participating interviewer, students must pose questions that both ask these expert voices to inform questions about their topic as well as elicit discussion between the two expert authors
• Redrafts of their inquiry-based paper that accumulates evidence, organizational strategies, and synthesis of ideas that they have deduced/induced from their work on the various scaffolded assignments.
• A Cover Letter written to their second-semester composition instructor which explains their profile as a writer: what were their writing aptitudes like when they entered the first semester course, what they learned/improved about their writing, and what challenges they plan to work on in their upcoming writing course.  

This sequence of assignments instructs students in a variety of processes, behaviors, and strategies of writing that intermix both creative and academic styles of writing.  Students encounter different modes of description, summary, definition & categorization, persuasion, argument, and self-reflection. The prescribed assignments of the course make certain that students practice diverse genres: letters, creative non-fiction, précis, scripts, interviewing, and prose.

Additionally, the composing purpose of these assignments helps students explore the thematic topic from different perspectives, discourses, and strategies. The individual pieces of writing may change their thinking, and thus their writing (and vice versa); writing-to-learn and learning-to-write become concurrent and interconnected goals.  As they compose new assignments in the sequence, they must return to prior assignments to revise and update them to reflect their current stage of their research-project’s evolution.  In requiring students to reflect upon their different stages and return to previous pieces of the writing sequence, students gain a recursive sense of the writing process rather than the one-shot attempt which often sends a simplistic, linear message about composing.  If composition courses do not stipulate these intensive practices of revision, there are few other places in their coursework where their composing aptitudes will receive such concentrated (re)examination.  

Co-Curricular Structure for English 101 Success:

Writing Center Workshops

Each fall and spring semester, extra curricular writing center workshops are held for all English 101 students.  During the fall, a percentage of each class is invited to attend.  These students are generally those who could benefit most from the extra practice.  During the spring, this is a mandatory addition to the course curriculum. There are four workshops throughout the semester which align with the prescribed English 101 curriculum.

Fall Workshops:

• JumpStart Session 1: Developing your Ideas
• JumpStart Session 2: Close Reading and Summarizing
• JumpStart Session 3: Sentence Integrity, Coherence, and Clarity
• JumpStart Session 4: Comparing and Contrasting Techniques

Spring Workshops:

• SpringStart 1: Writing Description/Creative Non-Fiction Essay
• SpringStart 2: Developing the Complex Idea for the Research Proposal & Proposal Format
• SpringStart 3: Compiling an Annotated Bibliography
• SpringStart 4: Using Sources

Early Alert & Intervention

The Early Alert system was developed to prompt instructors of a
First Year Seminar English 101 class to indicate if any student misses meetings or fails to submit assignments within the first few weeks of the semester.  Collaborating with the Student Academic Success Programs, these students will be contacted by a college staff member or a Peer Success Coach to ensure that they are able to stay on track with their academics. 

English 201: Disciplinary Investigations—Exploring Writing Across the Disciplines

The second semester of freshman writing at John Jay emphasizes writing-across-the -curriculum curriculum, introducing students to the diverging rhetorical approaches of different disciplines. Instructors choose a single theme and provide students with reading and writing assignments that address the distinct literacy conventions and processes of diverse fields. Students learn how to apply their accumulated repertoire of aptitudes and abilities to the writing situations presented to them from across the disciplines. This engenders a greater capacity for students to take on new writing challenges when writing in their chosen disciplines and in other future writing scenarios, including in the workplace.

As Susan McLeod reminds us in “Translating Enthusiasm into Curricular Change”:

The first of these areas [where WAC work takes place] is easy to overlook in any WAC effort because it is so close to home.  Writing across the curriculum is usually an outreach effort, missionary work in unexplored territory, working with the “other” rather than the “self.” But our introductory composition courses are usually the ones we have the most control over and the ones that most (sometimes all) freshmen have to take.  Making freshman composition a WAC course means rethinking our assumptions about its content.  (6)

English 201 familiarizes students with introductory lessons about WAC so that may be aware of disciplinary expectations of writing and avoid composing pitfalls when they encounter them.

Despite research that argues that students can only learn disciplinary writing in the field itself, Linton, Madigan and Johnson support the idea that composition classes should be the venue where students are acquainted with WAC ideas. In “Introducing Students to Disciplinary Genres,” they write:

We suggest that in the process of introducing students to disciplinary genres, the roles of faculty in composition and faculty in the disciplines are distinct but complementary. English faculty can prepare the ground for acquisition of disciplinary style […] even if “all” that general composition courses can accomplish is to introduce students to formal differences in the writing characteristic of different disciplines, that introduction is nevertheless a crucial stage in their acquisition of disciplinary style [… and] a focus on the acquisition of disciplinary style is desirable at the undergraduate level because of its pedagogical role in fostering students’ enculturation into their chosen fields. (62-63)

Admittedly, many composition instructors would be hard-pressed to teach the intricacies of most disciplinary writing styles.  However, they certainly can expose students to a variety of texts from different fields and have students identify the rhetorical, terminological, evidential, and presentational differences of a variety of disciplinary documents.  Rather than producing the harmful effects of misinformed explicit teaching of disciplinary writing, the aforementioned researchers propose that “it makes sense to incorporate explicit attention to writing at [the freshman composition] level” (65). 

Rather than prescribed assignments such as occur in English 101, in this second-semester course, instructors must choose their topic-based readings and writing assignments from a variety of disciplines.  By explicitly drawing attention to the preferred genres, research conventions, and specialized organization and formatting of different disciplines, we can help students more easily adapt their writing throughout their educational careers.

Co-Curricular Structure for English 101 Success:

Similarly to the workshops delivered to English 101 students, each spring, workshops are held for English 201 students. These meet the needs of the 201 learning objectives. A percentage of each class is invited to attend, and again, are generally students who could benefit most from the extra practice. 

Writing Center Workshops

• QuickStart 1: Rhetorical Contexts
• QuickStart 2: Recognizing Useful Research Sources
• QuickStart 3: Source-Based Paragraphs
• QuickStart 4: Using Evidence in the Disciplines