Where We Begin

Welcome to Culturally Responsive Composition: A Writer’s Handbook! Have you ever wished for a handy guide that would steer you in the right direction through all of your college-level reading and writing assignments? This text aims to be that kind of guide. Written by a college writing and literature instructor with over 20 years of experience in the field, this text draws from decades of experience teaching students who are entering the college reading and writing environment for the very first time. It includes examples, exercises, and definitions for just about every reading and writing related topic you will encounter in your college courses that require critical thinking and essay writing skills.

In this Open Education Resource (OER) text, we will enter the world of academic writing by exploring how to craft the college essay. We will do this through an interactive discussion of the six main stages of the writing process and the six main elements of the essay format. While no essay can be fully reduced to a simple series of steps or formulas, we will see that the essay does provide a coherent template, an ancient and powerful structure, through which we can engage the world of ideas and communicate our own perceptions and discoveries in meaningful and academically productive ways.

We will also examine how emerging technologies, along with multimodal instruction and composition, are changing the notion of how to teach and how to do college essay writing. And, most importantly, how our various subjectivities influence not only the ways we approach any topic, but also how we develop voice, tone, style, organization, and our academically-informed relationships to authority, tradition, and the ever changing world of ideas.

Remember this is a process. There is an old saying, “writing is rewriting.” The goal is not so much to arrive at a perfect piece of writing as it is to engage the spectacular and complex world around us with increasing clarity of thought and vision. And, hopefully, with a sharpened sense of the importance of careful listening, open inquiry, honest evaluation, and organic synthesis as vital steps on any path towards greater understanding.

An essay is an attempt to know something about the world with more depth of perspective, focus, and clarity. When we write an essay, we are opening ourselves up to the full spectrum of human (and nonhuman) knowledge and wisdom, while simultaneously reaching for new connections to the truth and its relevance to our lives. It is a sacred, scientific, and self-empowering task. One that we continue to perfect as long as we are alive and curious.

As mentioned above, this text also explores multimodal composition, culturally-sensitive approaches to writing, and themed course content structures to aid in the co-creation of a diverse, empowering, and engaging writing process that encourages students to both learn more about the world through the process of academic inquiry, and share their own perspectives and voices more clearly, confidently, and effectively.

How the Text is Organized

The text is organized into chapters that detail the major aspects of the college essay writing process and relevant stages. It covers a variety of topics including:

• cultural considerations in teaching and learning college writing,
• determining the audience and purpose for your writing assignments,
• getting started,
• thesis writing,
• patterns of development,
• drafting,
• working with sources,
• revising,
• and more.

While navigating through the text, you’ll notice that the majority of the chapters are located inside the “Main Body” section with a short introduction and a few appendices at the end.

Gendered and Gender-Neutral Language

As you read, you may notice that we use a variety of pronouns such as she/her, he/him, or they/them to refer to a person we’re discussing. Our goal is to represent all people, regardless of gender, and to do so in a balanced way. Therefore, in some paragraphs, we may designate “she” as the pronoun, while in others “he” will stand in for the person being written about. However, you’ll also come across “they” being used as a singular pronoun, which may be confusing at first. The pronoun “they” allows a single person to represent any gender, including those genders that aren’t accurately represented by “he” and “she.” It’s important to consider gender-neutral language in your own writing, so we wanted to make sure we modeled what that looks like in this text. Competent, college-level writing is a very empowering skill set to possess, and this text attempts to open those doors of possibility to as many people as possible.