Undergraduate Program
First-Year 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.
You can read about the program here, or visit the Composition at Miami website for more information.
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 as Citizens of a Diverse World. Students write autoethnographies, 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’s 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.
Advanced Placement
There are four ways you can earn equivalency credit for ENG 111 and/or ENG 112. (See below for additional details.)
- Advanced Placement Exam
- First-Year Portfolio
- Course Equivalency Transfer
- Transfer Portfolio
Please visit the Composition website for more information.