First Year Composition

English 110 - College Composition I

This course is designed to introduce students to—and to help them practice—the ways that people in a university setting write, read, and think. Through readings and writing assignments, students learn to analyze, synthesize, interpret, and evaluate ideas, information, situations, and texts. By the end of the course, students should:

  • Use composing and reading for inquiry, learning, critical thinking, and communicating in various contexts;
  • Read a diverse range of texts, attending especially to relationships between assertion and evidence, to patterns of organization, and to how these features function for different audiences and situations;
  • Use strategies—such as interpretation, synthesis, response, and critique—to compose texts that integrate your ideas with those from our readings;
  • Develop a writing project through multiple drafts;
  • Develop flexible strategies for reading, drafting, reviewing, collaborating, revising, rewriting, rereading, and editing;
  • Learn to give and to act on productive feedback to works in progress;
  • Reflect on the development of your composing practices and how those practices influence your writing and reading;
  • Develop knowledge of linguistic structures, including grammar, punctuation, and spelling, through practice in composing and revising;
  • Practice applying citation conventions systematically in your own work.*

To promote these outcomes, the course will also engage students in a real, current, and on-going academic project. In the process, students engage in serious and sustained work, reading academic and popular essays, writing four or five formal papers, and working through many stages of drafting and revising.

This is an Essential Studies course and will satisfy your distribution requirement in Communication (1).

*These objectives are adapted from the Council of Writing Program Administrators Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition.

English 130 Composition II: Writing for Public Audiences

This course, which builds upon ENGL 110, gives students experience with genres and rhetorical situations beyond the academic classroom. In begins with a set of common readings on an important social issue to establish a context for the work of the class. Throughout the semester, students engage in a series of research tasks and writing projects that center on a collaboratively-authored project proposal or recommendation for a specific audience or community. Then, students use the knowledge gained through research and rhetorical awareness to produce documents that will help inform and persuade the public. By the end of the course, students should:

  • Learn and use key rhetorical concepts through analyzing and composing a variety of texts;
  • Gain experience reading and composing in several genres to understand how genre conventions shape and are shaped by readers’ and writers’ practices and purposes;
  • Develop facility in responding to a variety of situations and contexts calling for purposeful shifts in voice, tone, level of formality, design, medium, and/or structure;
  • Locate and evaluate (for credibility, sufficiency, accuracy, timeliness, bias and so on) primary and secondary research materials;
  • Experience the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes;
  • Learn to give and to act on productive feedback to works in progress;
  • Adapt composing processes for a variety of technologies and modalities to address a range of audiences;
  • Gain experience negotiating variations in genre conventions;
  • Learn common formats and/or design features for different kinds of texts;
  • Practice applying citation conventions systematically.*

Through all of its projects, the course builds students' ability to work rhetorically--to think carefully about the audience, purpose, persona, and genre, as well as the impact that writing can have in the community. Like ENGL 110, this course requires revision, peer review, group projects, and writing workshops.

This is an Essential Studies course and will satisfy your distribution requirement in Communication (2).

*These objectives are adapted from the Council of Writing Program Administrators Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition.

How can I request transfer credits?

Students desiring to receive Composition transfer credit for writing courses taken at other institutions must first request that an official transcript from each college attended be forwarded to:

UND Office of Admissions
3501 University Ave Stop 8357
Grand Forks, ND 58202.

Transfer credits for courses will not be considered until these courses have been processed and recorded by UND’s Registrar’s Office. These courses will then be checked to see if they have been taken at an institution with which UND has a transfer agreement, and if so they will be recorded appropriately as English 110 or English 130.

Courses taken at colleges that are not on the transfer agreement list may receive an English 1XX status if taken at an accredited institution. To receive UND Composition credit for a course with an English 1XX status, please send a syllabus to the English Composition Office via mail, fax, or e-mail attachment to Jessica Zerr. If we are able to accept courses taken at other institutions as transfer for our composition classes, a memo will be prepared by the Composition Office indicating our acceptance of the transfer, and then it will be sent to the Registrar’s Office for processing.

Test Credits

In certain cases, test credits may be counted for composition credit:

  • An ACT score of 27 or higher (English test component: ENG or 3E) will waive ENGL 110.
  • The credit-by-exam chart, which includes AP and CLEP scores, can be found on the NDUS web site.

For questions concerning Advanced Placement (AP) credit while in high school, College Level Examination Program (CLEP), or ACT and/or SAT scores and Composition course waivers, please contact:

UND Office of Admissions
University of North Dakota
3501 University Ave Stop 8357
Grand Forks, ND 58202-8357
800-CALL-UND or 701-777-4463
admissions@UND.edu