Principles

Our use of the term “college writing” should be taken to indicate our opposition to the idea, often connected with the term “composition,” that writing courses should be unreflective training in formal fluency and surface-level correctness. We want our students to think deeply in their writing and, whenever possible, to think deeply about writing.

We also believe that good writing can only be the result of meaningful intellectual engagement. Whether your writing be a lab report, a history research paper, a short story analysis – or a memo outlining a new marketing strategy for Apex thing-a-magigs – it should involve creative and critical effort. If you write simply to fulfill assignments, if you stop caring about how you express yourself on paper, if you just go through the motions of superficial revision, your writing will lose its life and purpose. Your best writing will record the interactions between you and your world, you and your ideas, you and your readers.