The English Composition Program

Philosophy and Goals.  The English Department’s Composition Program serves the entire college; indeed, English 110 is the only course required of all students at Queens College.  Accordingly, our goal is to introduce an extraordinarily diverse student population to the principles of critical reading and writing that are the foundation of academic excellence, regardless of the learner’s major field of study.

Effective writing demands frequent practice – subsequently enforced in writing-intensive classes across the curriculum – as well as analytical and creative thinking, critical reflection, rigorous and imaginative revision, and careful editing and supporting theses with pertinent research.  Communicative competency is based on the author’s awareness of a responsibility to the reader, and this awareness is reflected in the writer’s attentiveness not only to grammar, syntax and mechanics, but to questions of voice, genre, structure, and diction.

Equally important, then, is the role of the Composition classroom as an intellectual common space in which students from widely varying cultures and academic backgrounds begin to recognize themselves as part of a community of interpreters and thinkers.  Our students are expected to read a range of texts and to respond reflectively to their own writing and to the writing of others’ including their peers’.  They learn to integrate their colleagues’ queries and suggestions into their revised essays as well as to incorporate outside sources and to document them according to accepted academic conventions for citation.  Ultimately the goal of the Composition Program is to facilitate the entry of our students into the cross-curricular dialogue of the college through their understanding of the recursive practices of reading and writing, thinking and revision, as central to the making and representation of knowledge.

English 110 - Required Composition Course

English 110, College Writing (4hrs. 3cr.) is the only required composition course.  Students must fulfill this requirement before they have taken 60 credits, and preferably in their freshman year.  The course examines the arts and practices of effective writing and reading in college, especially the use of language to discover ideas.  Methods of research and documentation are taught, along with some introduction to rhetorical purposes and strategies.  Students spend at least one hour per week conferring with each other or with their instructor about their writing.

English 120W - Writing Intensive Course

English 120, Writing, Literature, and Culture, (3 hrs. 3 cr.) was formerly the second required semester of composition, but is now optional.  English 120 is a writing course that involves continued practice in writing, together with close readings of various kinds of texts.  Courses are structured one or more thematic, socio-cultural, or historical issues such as identities, community, gender, quest narratives, or the arts.  Students explore the issues as they read and write about specific texts.