Welcome to the Writing 1 web site, which is intended to serve as a resource for current and prospective students. On this site you can learn more about the Writing 1 course, find information about Washington University’s writing requirement, and view work by previous Writing 1 students.
Although its course number is 100, Writing 1 is not an introduction to writing. It is a course that challenges students to become new and more thoughtful writers even as they develop existing strengths. It also prepares them to meet the demands of a new writing situation, and to work within the conventions of academic discourse. Writing Culture can be a synonym for a community of writers, or it can describe the act of writing about or imagining culture. More subtly, it captures the idea of how cultures or cultural ideas are associated with writing – i.e., how one’s culture impacts one’s writing. In Writing 1: Writing Culture, students will consider all of these ideas, and will explore the relationships between writers and readers, writers and subject matter, and writers and their rhetorical and cultural situations. [More]
If you are a student in Writing 1, be ready to ask yourself hard questions: why do you write the way you do? How can you develop existing strengths? How might comfortable habits limit your thinking or hamper your process? Above all, how you can really transform your writing? In this class, you will hone the skills described in the Course Aims, but ideally, you will do more than that: You will view yourself as a writer, not just as a student in a writing class, and you will begin to see that the binaries of writing and revision, creative and academic, style and content have less meaning as opposing ideas than they do as simultaneous considerations in your effort to speak your mind precisely, imaginatively, and persuasively. As the authors of Writing Analytically put it: “how things are said profoundly affects what they say” (258). Writing is the ongoing process of you speaking your mind – a process that becomes both more and less difficult as you gain new perspectives and broader cultural awareness.
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