Composition Curriculum and Outcomes
- ENC 1101 is a course focused on writing and language, prompting the questions: how does writing work? What do you need to know about writing that will help you succeed in later coursework?
- ENC 1102 is a course that encourages students to engage in genuine inquiry about how writing and language work. Students engage in intensive, semester long research projects with the goal of sharing their findings with others.
Each course has its own set of shared learning outcomes. These outcomes articulate the skills and habits that are foundational to writing development broadly and writing in the university in particular. Outcomes achieved in ENC 1101 prepare students to encounter the rigorous writing and research requirements articulated in outcomes for ENC 1102. Taken together, these courses prepare students to adapt with confidence to the varied and complex writing demands that they will encounter within the university and beyond.
Principles of ENC1101 and 1102 Curricula
ENC1101 and 1102 at UCF are based on these guiding principles:
- Writers need both declarative and procedural knowledge about writing. That is, they need to know how to use language effectively and how to adjust their writing processes to be most effective given the rhetorical situation in which they are writing. But they also benefit from a deep understanding of writing-related concepts such as rhetorical situation, genre, plagiarism, error, incubation, discourse community, and so on. Thus, the UCF composition courses include instruction in drafting and revising, but also have a clear content drawn from Writing Studies research and theory about composing.
- Writers need to engage in sustained drafting and revision in order to write most effectively. Student writers respond best to comments about their writing which they have time and opportunity to incorporate suggestions into revised drafts. Thus, the UCF composition courses are based on a process approach to writing instruction that requires students to engage in substantive global revision over time, in addition to careful editing at the sentence level to produce thoughtful and polished final drafts.
- Writers write most effectively when their writing is purposeful, transactional, communicative, contributive, and rhetorical. Thus, the UCF composition courses encourage students to understand and write for specific audiences to achieve clear purposes that are meaningful to the student.
- Writing instruction should strive to teach transferable practices and concepts. Thus, the UCF composition curriculum is rooted in research on knowledge transfer that suggests students should learn flexible concepts about writing rather than rigid rules, and they should engage in continual reflection on their writing practices to encourage mindfulness.
- Particular genres are best learned in the contexts where they mediate activity. Thus, the UCF composition curriculum focuses on purpose and content first in the belief that form follows function. Students in ENC1101 and ENC1102 will write in a variety of genres appropriate to their rhetorical purposes and learning goals. Genres specific to various disciplinary activity systems (for example, lab reports or philosophy essays) should be taught within the classrooms where those genres mediate meaningful work and learning. Genres or “modes” will not be taught acontextually in ENC1101 and ENC1102.
- Writers need to understand that language variation is the norm and not the exception in all situations and writing activities. Thus, the goal for writers is not a singular standardization, but how to build upon their existing proficiencies to negotiate language in use in real rhetorical and material situations. As a result, in ENC 1011 and 1102, we teach linguistic meta-awareness as opposed to acontextual standardized and rigid approaches to language use, as an integral part of engaging in all ill-structured writing problems. It follows that ENC 1101 and 1102 understands variation as an outcome of all living and lived languages rather than as so-called “error.” Students may bring variation to their writing as (1) part of language learning; (2) resistance to standard language uses; (3) purposeful use of a range of languages and dialects; and/or (4) creative play with language.