Composition
Miami is committed to creating a campus culture of writing, one characterized by university-wide writing excellence. The College Composition course sequence is one of the foundation requirements of the Miami Plan.
College Composition classes are designed to:
- encourage students to extend their range of rhetorical experiences
- ask challenging questions about their own written work and that of others
- examine their assumptions about language use
- interact with others who hold views different from their own.
College Composition instructors value the process of writing, as well as excellence in revised written work.
In English 111, College Composition, students read a variety of mostly non-fiction writing—essays, interviews, memoirs, speeches—collected in the course reader, Writing and Place: Critical Spaces for Composing. Students write ethnographies, rhetorical analyses, researched arguments, self-reflections, and design their own projects in response to their reading, class work, and personal goals.
Students in English 112, Composition and Literature, read a variety of literary texts—complex narrative works of fiction, drama, poetry, and some non-fiction. They study how narrative, dialogue, and figurative language, especially metaphor, shape textual meaning and audiences’ responses. And they practice using these elements in their own writing. Students write personal reading histories, analyze a novel’ narrative or point of view, explore dialogue and inter-textuality among several texts, examine metaphor’s effects in poetry and non-literary writing, and end with reflection. They continue to develop their understanding of the rhetorical situadedness of writing, begun in English 111, by reflecting on audience, purpose, and context for every piece of writing.