This text is intended for students and instructors of Academic Advanced Writing for English Language Learners. In our class, we will explore writing as a way to express yourself, to convey your ideas to others, to demonstrate what you know, and to advance scholarship in your academic field. Most importantly, we will explore the ways that strong writing can help you to communicate your unique thoughts and opinions.

You already have good writing skills in your first language(s). To enter scholarly conversations in the U.S., the next step is to sharpen your academic writing skills in American English. This text aims to help you uncover the expectations of professors and scholars in the U.S. regarding writing and critical thinking, to help you succeed in college.

This is a handbook to understanding College Composition, ENGL 121. The emphasis in this course won’t be learning how to construct grammatically-correct sentences (though grammar is part of it), nor will it be learning how to write the perfect five-paragraph essay (honestly, you can forget everything you’ve learned about those); instead, the emphasis will be learning how to contribute to a knowledge-making community—communities like the ones you will encounter in your other courses, regardless of discipline, but which you will also encounter in the professional and civic contexts you hope to be a part of after you leave college. In a nutshell, you are here to learn how to use the writing process to create knowledge and perspective that is useful to you and others.

This book represents the crowdsourced wisdom, reflections, failures, and triumphs of those educators exploring ungrading in their courses, at their institutions, and within their communities of practice. It contains contributions of all sizes, genres, and experience. Whatever is honest and authentic about doing ungrading. Hopefully, dear reader, you have come to this book with a deep interest in the ungrading phenomenon, especially as it relates to teaching during a global pandemic. More importantly, and regardless of any pandemic, it is assumed that the reading audience of this book is invested in a pedagogy of empathy, an approach that trusts students first and foremost. When the investment involves our students, nothing else compares.

One important part of this text is that it supports user annotation (and commenting) via Hypothes.is. We can use this tool to share our annotations and engage with one another as we read/respond/reflect upon the various contributions in this text. According to Remi Kalir, “[A]nnotation is a collaborative activity that can contribute to social connectedness and online community-building” (Annotate Your Syllabus 3.0). We can become knowledge producers as we make our thinking visible via social annotation.

This text contains the essential readings and resources for ENGL-121. It is an open textbook, which means that it is considered part of Open Educational Resources (OER). Usually, OER are composed under a Creative Commons license that invites its users to reuse, revise, remix, adapt, and repurpose content for specific needs. One important part of this text is that it supports user annotation (and commenting) via Hypothes.is. We will be using this tool to share our annotations and engage with one another as we read/analyze the readings in this text.

This introductory text has been created from a combination of original content and materials compiled and adapted from a number of open text publications. The majority of the content is adapted from Open English @ SLCC, an evolving digital book created and maintained by English Department faculty at Salt Lake Community College. This book is evolving and adaptive, offering a range of texts on rhetoric, writing and reading, with specific attention to the needs of a diverse community of users. Unlike a traditional textbook, the writing in this book invites remix, adaptation, and repurposing to match the specific needs of its users--emerging writing students and instructors primarily--but also faculty and students at other schools, course designers, WPAS, and anyone else interested in open texts about writing, language and literacy.