Introduction

The First-Year Writing Seminar is designed to give you space to focus on your writing, a little breathing room to develop skills and habits of mind that will serve you throughout your time at BC. But because college is short and life is long, we will consider the way writing is not just a skill you need to pass your college courses, but is a basic mode of engaging with the world that can enrich your life long after you graduate.

In my mind, writing is primarly about discovering and creating meaning in the world around us and learning to ask ourselves the important questions that face us, our communities, and our environments. For this reason, our course will be framed by three questions:

1) Where are we from?
2) Where are we?
3) Where are we going?

The point here is to give you plenty of room to wander as a writer while still providing us some common ground as a class. Our task as a community of writers will be to help each other come up with the most creative and insightful answers to these questions. With some luck, we'll come away having learned some things from each other about the places, cultures, and communities that we inhabit and about how we make sense of the world around us.

Course Objectives

To ground our writing in actual rhetorical situations--—places, cultures, and communities—so that we can figure out where we are in the world in deeper ways.

To write in a variety of genres, for a variety of audiences, and to answer a variety of questions.

To write about questions that make you want to keep writing and your audience want to keep reading, and that address significant issues in our lives and our communities.

To learn how to give and take feedback by becoming engaged, supportive readers of each other's writing.

To write insightfully about your own writing process and demonstrate an awareness of how your writing has developed during the course.