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You may already appreciate the central role writing plays in your everyday life and academic career, as well as in other contexts. If you’re already a strong writer, you might wonder why you are required to take a class like English 100. As this course will emphasize, writing is a socially situated practice that takes into account purpose, context, audience, and other factors that may inform why you write, what you write, and how you write. To put it more simply, new writing situations require new writing strategies.

Certainly, we all appreciate some general qualities of “good” writing—such as clarity of thought and language—but there are many more qualities of effective writing that connect to specific situations. So while the types of writing that you’ve done during high school or for other occasions have developed and focused your writing for that context and those experiences, you’ll find that the writing you do at the university and beyond requires a variety of new and/or different strategies and practices. You will need to resituate both yourself and your writing.

As an introduction to college composition, English 100 prepares you to identify your purposes for writing and to make informed decisions about the choices you face when you write. What are the kinds of questions you need to ask in order to approach and execute your writing effectively? Even in the defined context of the university, purposes and decisions vary widely. Some writing strategies can be applied across courses, regardless of discipline, or within cocurricular and extracurricular activities, or even as you begin to create materials for your career beyond the university. But you also need to recognize when to use other strategies that may require specialized knowledge about how information is communicated or how arguments are made in specific disciplines.

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