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 course introduces students to the writing process as a means of developing ideas into clear, correct, and effective writing.

This OER course uses inquiry-based research methodology to help students learn to write college level essays. This version of the course uses a broad theme of How To Navigate Your Major to help students understand the first year writing course's relevance to their own academic pursuits. This course is designed with four units that scaffold writing assignments towards a Field of Study research essay, and is presented here in a 7-week format that also can be expanded to a 15-week term.

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.