What Are We Doing?

                                                                                   (photo by Michael Rifenburg)
The overall objective of First-Year Composition is to introduce students to the expectations of college-level reading and expository writing. To this end, the course will emphasize understanding research and writing as processes, generating claims and supporting them with appropriate evidence, rhetorical analysis of your own writing and that of others, and the critical exploration of the conventions of “academic” discourse. Taking the topic of “writing” as the focal point of our inquiry throughout the semester, the literacy tasks we’ll compose for the course serve as opportunities to examine common notions of what writing is, what it entails, and how it gets accomplished within specific rhetorical situations. Through focusing our reading, writing, and thinking on writing, I hope to help you develop writing skills that transfer to future writing contexts you will face at UNG and elsewhere.

Finally, this specific class is unique because student-athletes largely make it up. For the past decade, I have worked at Auburn, Oklahoma, and now here at UNG with student-athlete writers. I have published articles about how best to work with student-athlete writers and how their knowledge of their sport might actually help them in a writing classroom. 

I even just published a piece about UNG’s men’s basketball team. All this is to say that I am committed to working with you and strongly believe that what you know about your sport can help you when you face any writing situation.