Hello, instructors! Welcome to our open Commons course, College Writing I, available for reuse and remixing across CUNY campuses and beyond. Please explore the course content and structure while you’re here. If you are interested in adopting the course or using this structure to teach a different course, the WordPress export file can be downloaded from OpenEd.CUNY (a Blackboard Learn package is also available). Once you’ve imported the file into your own WordPress site, you’ll have editing permissions and be able to access the hidden For Instructors page for adoption/adaptation advice. If you have questions or comments about this course, please email gened@sps.cuny.edu.

Hello, students! Welcome to College Writing I. This course is a three-credit, required, General Education course. The purpose of the course is to introduce you to academic reading, writing, and research. Throughout the course of the semester, you will learn how to develop, research, plan, write, and revise a variety of academic writing projects from across the disciplines. 

College Writing I is centered around four major assignments, with smaller assignments each week to help you prepare to complete those assignments. Rubrics for all assignments are available to you on the Rubrics page. To help you with these assignments, you will receive feedback from me, your instructor, and your classmates throughout the semester, and you will be both required and encouraged to revise your formal work. As you work through the major assignments, you will also be shown how to find scholarly sources and how to use APA format (the American Psychological Association’s style for citing sources), you will be introduced to editing and proofreading strategies, and you will be asked to reflect upon and consider your writing process along the way. Ultimately, the course is designed to help you more fully understand your academic writing process, to provide you with strategies for writing stronger and more effective academic arguments, and to give you solid writing practices that you can apply to your other courses. 

Happily, you will not need to purchase any resources for this class, as it is a zero-cost class. This means that all the materials you will need to read and access will be provided for you. And, as with all of your classes, you also have access to trained writing tutors, so you can receive additional assistance with your writing for this (or any other) course. Please ask me about these tutoring opportunities. All this means that you will be doing a good deal of reading, writing, and research over the course of the semester, and because there is a lot to cover, we’re going to move quickly. Each week of the course begins on a Monday and ends on the following Sunday at 11:59pm EST. You can see the specific dates in the Course Schedule section of this site.

To get started, please do the following:

• First, go to the Course Information tab above to view the course tour video and read all of the materials you find there, paying close attention to the syllabus. Then, visit the Week 1 Schedule and get started on the material in Week 1.
• If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask them! You can reach me by email (see Instructor Information on the right-hand side of this page) or by posting a question to the Q&A discussion. 
• Finally, I will hold weekly office hours—see the Instructor Information for details. Please stop by if you have any questions or concerns—or email me to schedule a separate meeting if my availability doesn’t match with yours.

Thanks and again, welcome to the course.