First-Year Writing Program Mission

First-Year Writing and Great Works of World Literature form an essential core of the general education experience at Baruch College. Since Aristotle, education in the Western tradition has centered on rhetoric (the study and practice of communicating effectively) and poetics (the study of dramatic, poetic, and literary works). Building on this rich tradition, courses in first-year writing and Great Works of Literature focus on developing writing and reading practices that are vital in 21st-century globalized environments.

The First-Year Writing Program at Baruch College emphasizes rhetorical approaches to multi-genre writing and reading, with a focus on academic prose in ENG 2100: Writing I and multimodal composing and digital literacies in ENG 2150: Writing II. The two-course sequence, required of all students at Baruch College, is designed to help you identify the persuasive strategies at work in all discourse and adapt your own writing for particular audiences, genres, and purposes.

While your course will have a thematic focus, the subject of Writing I and II, simply put, is writing. You will read and discuss a wide variety of texts—for example, creative nonfiction pieces, news articles, academic articles, short stories, poetry, films—with careful attention to the role of rhetorical conventions such as style, tropes, genre, audience, and purpose. Studying the writing styles and rhetorical moves of professional, published writers will inform your approaches to writing within academic contexts and beyond.