Course Introduction

By Tim Lindgren | Last Updated: February 25, 2004

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.

This particular FWS section might also be described as a collaborative writing project: Take fifteen students all from over the country, from many different backgrounds and with different perspectives on the world, and throw them together into one class for fifteen weeks. Then, give them the semester to respond to three simple questions and see what they come up with. The result will be online collection of student writing that explores who we are, where we've come from, and what it means to write in the contexts that define us.

Our course will be framed by three questions:

• Where are we from?
  
• Where are we?
  
• 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.

Writing always happens in particular contexts for particular reasons and for particular audiences. For this reason, we'll be looking at the rhetorical strategies required to write in a variety of genres and with different readers in mind:

• A Personal Essay for an audience of peers
• An Online Feature Article for a general online audience
• A Critical Analysis of an Argument for a university audience

Throughout the course I'll be asking to write about your writing so that by the final portfolio you'll be prepared to describe your own writing process in depth and demonstrate an awareness of how your writing has developed during the course.

Some of the areas we'll cover are:

• Invention: Developing good ideas
• Revision: Doing multiple drafts of a single essay
• Editing: Gaining control of such surface features as syntax, grammar, punctuation, and spelling
• Collaboration: Understanding the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes
• Feedback: Learning how to give and take feedback by becoming engaged, supportive readers of each other's writing

Another task of this course will be to examine the technologies we use to write and how the web is providing new rhetorical situations that affect the way we communicate.

Topics and Goals:

• Technologies: Use a variety of writing technologies, including pen and paper, word processors, weblogs, synchronous chats.
• Writing Process: Reflect on how these writing technologies affect our writing processes.
• Critique: Develop critical attitudes toward various aspects of online culture, including visual literacy, using the Internet for research, analyzing and evaluating websites.

To get started with the course website, take a look at the following pages:

• Creating a Personal Profile
• Handbook

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