Composition at CSUDH

Composition at CSUDH

The Composition Program at CSUDH encourages you to engage with the world as a writer: to absorb yourself in language, to read with both your own and the writer's purposes in mind, and to make your own thoughts take permanent form in writing, so that you can contribute to the ongoing conversation that makes CSUDH a great university and the larger conversation that our species has held for the past 100,000 years. So the Comp Program emphasizes the fact that reading, research, writing, and thinking are fundamentally rhetorical acts. This means that they are acts of persuasion with particular purposes, aimed at particular audiences, and set in a particular time and place acts in which you're trying to influence someone else's thinking and that in turn means that the writing you do at CSUDH can have wide-ranging significance beyond just completing an assignment.

To increase your understanding of writing as a rhetorical act, your composition course at CSUDH will work to build a classroom community and cultivate deep collaboration between you and your fellow students. You'll benefit from a diversity of classroom approaches as you work collaboratively with fellow students to improve your writing, to use informal writing to improve your learning in all of your classes, and to make the process of writing less stressful and more fruitful. You'll encounter a broad range of ideas about the world and increase your ability to engage others through language.

We also see writing and rhetoric as fundamentally democratic acts, as a way of helping make the United States a nation where the equality of all people is honored and protected. So we are dedicated to teaching practices that are anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic, anti-transphobic, and anti-ableist. We strive to make sure all students are welcome in our classes, so we aim to create classrooms in which students can engage passionately and critically in discussion while at the same time demonstrating, through language and demeanor, respect for other students and a willingness to understand and examine perspectives different from their own.

Our ultimate goal in the CSUDH Composition Program is to introduce you to writing as a crucial way of learning, making meaning, and communicating in the world.

Here are some resources to help you succeed in your writing classes at CSUDH. If you have questions about anything here, or anything else regarding your writing courses, you can ask your professor or the Director of Composition, Dr. Randy Cauthen.

Writing Courses at CSUDH

Course Learning Outcomes for First-Year Composition

Directed Self-Placement: You will need to complete the Directed Self-Placement process before registering for a 100-level writing course.

The Writing Center: The CSUDH Writing Center supports students at all levels as they prepare, draft, and revise their writing for various courses, departments, and programs. To promote in students both a positive disposition to help-seeking and a confident writer self-identity, the Writing Center fosters a safe, nurturing, and equitable space where members of the DH community can share, discuss, draft, and revise their writing as part of a community of writers.

The Graduation Writing Assessment Requirement (GWAR): In normal times, all students are required to pass the GWAR to be able to graduate. But due to Covid-19, that requirement has been suspended for students graduating in the Fall Semester of 2020.