Rhetoric & Composition I

COMP 1 is a sixteen-week First-Year Composition (FYC) course that helps students develop writing, rhetorical awareness, and communication skills across genres, media, and audiences. Through scaffolded writing projects and a digital ePortfolio, students build genre awareness, digital fluency, and transferable writing practices aligned with the department’s Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs).

COMP 1 consists of two sections:

Rhetoric and Composition I: This course is designed for freshmen with a high school GPA of 3.00 or higher and transfer students without prior first-year composition credit. It helps students develop rhetorical awareness, critical thinking, and writing skills across academic, professional, and digital contexts through traditional essays, multimodal projects, collaboration, and reflective writing. Students learn how to adapt their writing to different audiences, genres, and purposes while building transferable communication skills for college, work, and everyday life.

Rhetoric and Composition: Foundation: This course is a supported version of First-Year Composition designed to help students strengthen their academic writing, rhetorical awareness, and confidence as college writers. It particularly supports freshmen entering college with a GED or a high school GPA of 2.99 or below by providing additional guidance in writing, revision, reflection, multimodal composing, and collaborative learning.

Rhetoric and Composition I	Description
Literacy Narrative (5 weeks)	Students turn a personal narrative into a new medium (podcast, video, or comic) to examine how genre, audience, and medium shape rhetoric, followed by a major reflective analysis explaining their choices.
Observation and Value Analysis (5 weeks)	Students analyze a digital community’s communication practices to determine what makes a post successful, followed by a major reflective analysis of their positionality and rhetorical decisions.
Making Change (5 weeks)	A collaborative project where students propose an inclusive change to a public or institutional space through a multimodal persuasive argument, followed by an individual reflection on rhetoric, collaboration, and revision.
Reflection Overview (1 weeks)	A capstone reflection where students analyze their growth as writers and explain how they will transfer their learning to future writing contexts.

Rhetoric and Composition: Foundation	Description
Literacy Narrative: Foundation (5 weeks)	Students compose a literacy narrative about learning a new skill or adapting to an unfamiliar environment, remediate that narrative into a multimodal format, and 'reflect on the rhetorical choices they made for audience, genre, and medium.
This I Believe (5 weeks)	Students write a personal “This I Believe” essay that connects a core belief to meaningful life experiences while reflecting on the rhetorical, persuasive, and stylistic choices they made throughout the writing process
Discourse Community Analysis (4 weeks)	Students analyze a new discourse community by observing its language, genre conventions, and interactions in order to make an argument about what the community values as “good” communication while reflecting on their rhetorical and multimodal choices.
Reflection Overview (2 weeks)	A capstone reflection where students analyze their growth as writers and explain how they will transfer their learning to future writing contexts.