Rhetoric & Composition I
Rhetoric & Composition I is a sixteen-week First-Year Composition (FYC) course designed for freshmen with a high school GPA of 3.00 or higher and transfer students without prior first-year composition credit. Through scaffolded writing projects, multimodal composition, collaboration, reflective writing, and a digital ePortfolio, students develop rhetorical awareness, critical thinking, genre knowledge, and digital fluency.
The course emphasizes adapting writing to different audiences, purposes, media, and contexts while building transferable communication practices aligned with the department’s Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs). These skills prepare students for academic, professional, and everyday writing situations.
Assignments include downloadable student writing samples if instructors would like to use them as examples for classroom instruction, discussion, and assignment preparation. A copy of Student Consent Form is available for instructors who would like to invite their students to contribute writing samples. Instructors should review the consent form with students and obtain their permission before submitting any work.
To contribute a student writing sample, instructors should email both the completed consent form and the corresponding writing sample to niu.fyc.repository email address.
The course consists of four writing assignments:
| 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. |
Experimental Rhetoric & Composition I is a sixteen-week First-Year Composition (FYC) course designed for freshmen with a high school GPA of 3.00 or higher and transfer students without prior first-year composition credit. This syllabus is the same as the standard syllabus for the program with only two differences in second and third writing projects focus on AI Guideline and mindful use of AI in research.
The course consists of four writing assignments:
| 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. |
| AI Writing Guideline (5 weeks) | Students will use an AI Practice activity as a starting point to write guidelines for good use of AI in writing. They will then explain these guidelines in detail in a reflection. |
| Research Design (5 weeks) | They’ll take what you’ve learned about using AI from previous writing project, and they’ll make a claim about AI use and design a research study that would prove your statement true or false. Then they write a reflection explain their choices and methods. |
| Reflection Overview (1 week) | A capstone reflection where students analyze their growth as writers and explain how they will transfer their learning to future writing contexts. |