A Review Of Singh-Corcoran's Article "Composition As A Write Of Passage"

According to Wikipedia First-year composition (sometimes known as freshman composition or freshman writing) is an introductory core curriculum writing course in American colleges. In the article “Composition as a write of passage” by Nathalie Singh-Corcoran,2011 is trying to motivate the students to take the FYC a serious course as it will help them in long-term. Singh-Corcoran is a credible source as she taught in Department of English at West Virginia University. She is using many researches, and sharing personal experiences to persuade her audience, “As a former FYC student and a current FYC teacher, I can tell you the positive effects of the university writing requirement are far reaching”. She argues that most students do not find FYC as productive in their respective fields but they have a lot of benefits in their study and professional life “FYC course does prepare you for college-level reading and writing and for the critical reading and writing that you will do every day in your career after college.”

Singh-Corcoran is effective in persuading her audience as she is using her personal feelings as a student, her researches and few studies are also supporting her claims.Singh-Corcoran is emotionally influencing her audience by providing her personal experience when she was a first-year student. She is discussing various merits of studying these courses as they will help them throughout their life even after college. Singh-Corcoran is supporting her claims by giving example of Godwin Erekaife, a student who was not interested in FYC at first “Godwin didn’t believe that what he learned in FYC would positively impact his engineering coursework.” But later-on Godwin finds that he developed his skills in writing “research, organizing, and citations”. In the study by Elizabeth Wardle, she discovered that most students did not find the FYC useful. In a similar study by Linda Bergmann and Janet Zepernick found that a large proportion of students were interested in study their own courses rather than FYC. But afterward these studies found that students learn a lot of skills from FYC and few developed interests in writing and reading that they wanted to take them in universities as well “It helped them ‘think about writing in the university’”.

By presenting these studies Singh-Corcoran is influencing her audience to take FYC even if they look it as useless at first.After sharing Godwin’s experience as FYC students, author then takes the attention of her audience towards the assignments that they must do during the course. She briefly explains that how they should do the assignments and on what criterion she will assess those assignments. Afterwards, Singh-Corcoran gives another example of student ‘Amanda King’ who has to give her reports in Psychology class. Amanda said that she used her skills of critical thinking- “Skills that are very discipline-specific”.

Critical thinking is the same in all the fields of education said Professor John Bean, Seattle University. Critical thinking is the same as all the require solutions for problems, challenges etc. and assessing answers to them. Amanda was able to complete her assignments because she did FYC and her experience helped her, “Amanda obtained early experiences in critical thinking when she took FYC and composed essays like the ‘Argument Analysis’”. The study by Professor Bean is generalizing the merits of having FYC which is attracting the audience to take interest even if they think that FYC is not their professional study.

After arguing about general purpose FYC Singh-Corcoran then gives an example of a professional who points out that professional writing is somehow different from writing at school “Lauren O’Connor points out above, school writing is very different from workplace writing.” (Qtd. In Singh-Corcoran). She describes that O’ Connor did a lot of research before entering into professional writing. She says that FYC students are very fortunate that they get a lot of support from their college side and can use resources but in working life you cannot depend on any other. Lauren also found that she did all the work in a team except Emails or memos. Singh-Corcoran by giving the example of Lauren persuade her student that FYC is just a start for writing, writing is beyond the college life.

To conclude, Singh-Corcoran’s article have emotional validations, Studies and researches that are helping to influence her audience. Singh-Corcoran might have influenced her readers in conclusion, but she could have gone in more depth and have presented little more examples that can affect audience in a positive manner. Singh was able to address the problems of the students as she uses her own experience and she was able incorporated her own examples to persuade her audience. In my opinion Singh-Corcoran’s article is fulfilling her objective to influence the students to enter FYC and should not take it as a burden.