Developmental Rhetoric & Composition
Rhetoric and Composition Foundation: This is a sixteen-week supported version of the First-Year Composition course designed to help students strengthen their academic writing, rhetorical awareness, and confidence as college writers. The course is taught by instructors with experience teaching developmental writing. 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.
This course helps students develop writing, rhetorical awareness, and communication skills across genres, media, and audiences. To provide additional support, enrollment is limited to 15 students, and the Writers' Workshop also provides corequisite weekly support. 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).
The course includes four writing assignments:
| Developmental Rhetoric & Composition | 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. |