ENG 101:  Composition I – Exploration and Authorship: An Inquiry-based Writing Course

This course introduces students to the skills, habits, and conventions necessary to prepare inquiry-based research for college. While offering students techniques and practices of invention and revision, this theme-based composition course teaches students the expectations of college-level research, academic devices for exploring ideas, and rhetorical strategies for completing investigative writing. Students prepare a sequence of prescribed assignments that culminate in a final research paper. These assignments provide small manageable tasks that scaffold the process of the normally overwhelming research paper. Students complete a semester ending portfolio, part of which involves reflecting on their writing and their development as writers and critical thinkers over the course of the semester.

While instructors are free to choose the theme and readings for their courses, they follow a prescribed series of assignments that each student completes for a final portfolio.  Instructors choose the content and readings that interest them in hopes that they will instill this same investment in their students. 

Throughout the semester, the instructor presents techniques and strategies that will help students both decipher texts and well as compose their own.  The inquiry-based paper (a. k. a., the research paper) is the semester-long endeavor of this course. In lieu of assigning this specifically academic genre three weeks before the end of the semester and saying, “Get ready, get set, go,” instructors assign a mandated sequence of step-by-step writing tasks that collectively inform the essay-composing process as well as motivates students to explore the topic and its formulation into words. In other words by composing a sequence of interrelated assignments, students explore how the contents of written academic papers are invented, organized, researched, articulated, and presented.  They then compile these various pieces of writing plus a final culminating inquiry-based project into a portfolio; they earn their grade based on the contents of this writing portfolio.  

English 201: Disciplinary Investigations—Exploring Writing Across the Disciplines

The second semester of freshman writing at John Jay emphasizes writing-across-the -curriculum curriculum, introducing students to the diverging rhetorical approaches of different disciplines. Instructors choose a single theme and provide students with reading and writing assignments that address the distinct literacy conventions and processes of diverse fields. Students learn how to apply their accumulated repertoire of aptitudes and abilities to the writing situations presented to them from across the disciplines. This engenders a greater capacity for students to take on new writing challenges when writing in their chosen disciplines and in other future writing scenarios, including in the workplace.

English 201 familiarizes students with introductory lessons about WAC so that may be aware of disciplinary expectations of writing and avoid composing pitfalls when they encounter them.

Rather than prescribed assignments such as occur in English 101, in this second-semester course, instructors must choose their topic-based readings and writing assignments from a variety of disciplines.  By explicitly drawing attention to the preferred genres, research conventions, and specialized organization and formatting of different disciplines, we can help students more easily adapt their writing throughout their educational careers.

English 245: Creative Non-fiction

In this course, students will experiment with writing creative nonfiction. The class will produce a magazine from start to finish, including writing the articles and editing them for publication. Students will compose, revise and edit several pieces of nonfiction prose, both long and short, on topics of their choice. These may include observations of life in the city, an autobiographical sketch, or an interview/profile. Students will work on developing an authorial voice and on making their writing lively and concise. This course counts as an elective in the Writing Minor.

ENG 225: Interpreting Objects, Texts and Culture

This course teaches students to identify, analyze, and deconstruct the messages and meanings behind everything they see, hear, read, and experience. Furthermore, it argues that, as responsible consumers and creators of culture, it is imperative that they understand, interpret, and critically engage with those messages, including those with which they may disagree. Utilizing a variety of theories and methods, this course enables students not only to understand how the texts and objects they come into contact with (such as advertisements, television shows, newspaper articles, blog sites, clothing, electronic devices, etc.) shape society, but also how, as responsible members of society, they can participate and intervene in this process. Through this analytical work, they will come to understand the impacts such messages have on society as a whole as well as they individuals who inhabit it.