Writing 1
Registration Information
New students cannot register for Writing 1 until they have obtained their semester placement assignments from their advisors.
Writing 1 Office Location
The Writing 1 Office is in Room 216, Ridgley Hall. Enter Ridgley through the main doors (main entrance to Holmes Lounge). Turn left, go up the stairs to the 2nd floor. Room 216 is the first office on the right.
Writing 1
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. In Writing 1, students will explore the relationships between writers and readers, writers and subject matter, and writers and their rhetorical and cultural situations.
As such Writing 1 challenges students to grow as writers of interesting, efficient, and persuasive prose. It offers students methodologies, examples, practice, and mentorship by which to better
- read and originate ideas about a variety of primary texts, ranging from advertising to poetry, from essays to film;
- structure thought in ways that reflect the spirit of academic inquiry taking place across the departments at this university, especially in the dynamic encounter of ideas with fact, counterpoint, and anomaly;
- find and efficiently use secondary sources to deepen and evolve ideas as well as support and clarify them;
- understand the conventions and practices of academic and professional citation—especially as they were developed to help scholars create and maintain clear boundaries between personal ideas and the ideas of others;
- imagine and address audience in a piece of writing;
- become aware of, and intellectually responsible for, grammatical, stylistic, and organizational choices;
- experience writing, itself, as a mode of discovery in which the processes of analysis and thinking are anchored in the process of writing;
- grasp the vital role of creativity in all genres of writing;
- understand revision as something beyond mere editing, but instead as a recursive process of refining thinking;
- collaborate with other writers in such activities as peer review, oral presentation, and discussion, along the way fostering a community that can support and challenge one another to grow as readers, critical thinkers, and writers.
Initial Course Placement
Most students place directly into Writing 1 and will take the course either in fall or spring semester of their first year of study. (Advisors have pre-assigned semester placement information. Students should not register for Writing 1 until they know which semester they have been assigned to take the course.) Students enrolled in IPH/Text & Tradition or Law & Society programs take a linked Writing 1 course. In order to fulfill the first year writing requirement, students in all sections must earn a C+ or better in the course. Students who earn a grade of C or lower will take additional writing coursework. (In most cases, they will be required to re-take Writing 1.)
Administrative Staff
Assistant Director
Chuck Sweetman
Associate Director
Doreen Salli
Director
Robert Wiltenburg
For teaching opportunities, click here.
For questions about Writing 1, contact the Writing 1 Office at 314-935-4899 or writing1@artsci.wustl.edu.