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.

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.