College Topic: First Year College Composition

10-second review: Does the first-year college composition course meet the students’ writing needs in other disciplines?

Title: Review of College Writing and Beyond: A New Framework for University Writing Instruction. Anne Beaufort. (Utah State University Press, 2007). Reviewed by Linda Brender and Jeffrey Klausman. Teaching English in Two-Year Colleges (December 2008), 196-205. A publication of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).

Summary/Quote: “…the engineering faculty requiring a more objective writing style than the writing style preferred by the history faculty. The engineering assignments contained data to be analyzed concretely, whereas the history assignments required a more subjective perspective from the students.” p. 197.

Summary/Quote: “Freshman writing, if taught with an eye toward transfer of learning and with an explicit acknowledgement of the context of freshman writing itself as a social practice, can set students on a course of life-long learning so that they know how to learn to become better and better writers in a variety of social contexts.” Anne Beaufort.

Comment: Maybe the emphasis should be on analyzing the type of writing required in other disciplines. Students use models from other disciplines, analyze them and then set up guidelines for constructing them. RayS.