If you are teaching a writing-intensive course at Pitt, particularly a lower-level course that may include non-majors, you may find it useful to know something about the writing preparation your students bring with them. This page describes the composition sequence students complete before enrolling in a W course and offers some context for building on that foundation.
The Composition Sequence
Pitt students typically complete a three-course writing sequence:
- Seminar in Composition (ENGCMP 0200), including several variants (SC: Education, SC: Diversity, SC: Film, and others). Students must complete SC with a C- or better before they can register for a W course.
- A writing-intensive (W) course at any level in any department.
- A W course within their major, which is often an advanced or capstone course.
What Students Learn in Seminar in Composition
All sections of Seminar in Composition share the same four learning goals:
Engage in composing as a creative, disciplined form of critical inquiry. Students compose as a way to generate ideas as well as explain them. They form questions, explore problems, and examine their own experiences, thoughts, and observations, making productive use of uncertainty as they engage in sustained scrutiny of a subject.
Compose thoughtfully crafted essays that position their ideas among other views. In response to reading, listening to, and discussing challenging texts, students develop informed positions that engage with the positions of others. They learn to analyze as well as summarize the texts they read, paying close attention to both the ideas voiced by other writers and the specific choices those writers make with language and form.
Compose with precision, nuance, and awareness of formal conventions. Students work on crafting clear, precise prose that uses a variety of sentence and paragraph structures. They learn conventions for quoting and paraphrasing responsibly, and they develop editing strategies that reflect attention to the relation between style and meaning. They also have opportunities to consider when and how to challenge conventions as well as follow them.
Revise by rethinking the assumptions, aims, and effects of prior drafts. SC approaches the essay as a flexible genre, not a rigid thesis-driven structure. Students spend significant class time considering the purpose, logic, and design of their own compositions, and they revise their work in light of feedback and discussion.
By the time students arrive in your W course, they should have experience drafting and revising across a semester, working toward a final project or portfolio that involves substantial rethinking of earlier work. They will have practiced peer review and participated in workshops on writing in progress. They will have written in the first person and from personal experience, and they will have begun to think about audience, though usually in the context of an academic reader rather than a professional or public one.
Building on That Foundation
The subject of SC is student writing itself. In your W course, writing becomes the vehicle through which students enact and deepen their understanding of your course content. That shift is worth being explicit about with students: they are learning not just to write well in the abstract, but to write well in your discipline, for the purposes and audiences that matter in your field.
A few things tend to support a successful transition from SC to a W course:
Make the purpose of writing in your discipline explicit. Students in SC explore writing as a mode of inquiry and critical thought. In your course, they need to understand what writing is for in your specific context: what it does, who reads it, and what makes it effective. Published work in your field can serve as useful models here: rather than just assigning readings for their content, study them with students for what the writers are doing and how. Work regularly with students' writing in progress in class to show how students are trying out adapting to the purpose of writing taught in your course.
Build in scaffolding. The writing sequence students experienced in SC was typically heavily scaffolded, with lower-stakes assignments building toward full drafts and full drafts building toward a final project or portfolio. That approach works well in W courses too. Breaking the writing into stages — proposals, outlines, annotated bibliographies, partial drafts — gives students multiple points of entry and makes revision more manageable. For W courses with multimodal final projects such as video essays or podcasts, detailed scripting and storyboarding can perform the same work as drafts and revisions while also generating the necessary composed pages.
Guide peer review explicitly. Students will have practiced peer review in SC, but what counts as productive feedback varies by context and genre. It is worth modeling what useful feedback looks like in your course: what reviewers should attend to, what questions they should be asking, and how to give feedback that reflects the conventions of writing in your field, including professional spheres if relevant.
Consider how audience shifts. Students in SC typically write for their professor or for a generalized academic reader. Many W courses ask students to adapt to new audiences, such as specialists in a discipline, public readers, professional communities, or policymakers. Naming that shift explicitly and designing assignments that require students to think carefully about audience can be valuable. Some W courses ask students to create work for one audience and then transform it for a different audience in the process of revision; this is particularly useful for courses that ask students to move between academic writing and a professional or public setting.
Consider the role of personal experience and the first person. Students will have rehearsed writing in the first person and from personal experience in SC. Depending on the context of your course, think carefully about how your assignments will ask students to evolve their thinking. Will personal experience remain a viable point of entry or source of evidence? What role will the first-person subject position play in the writing your students will do?
If you have questions about any of this, or would like support in designing your course, the Writing Institute offers pedagogy consultations, works with departments through the Curriculum Design Studio, and offers the WID Faculty Seminar each semester for faculty who want to think carefully about writing instruction in their disciplines alongside colleagues from across the school.