During the COVID-19 pandemic, institutional parameters shifted unexpectedly, which influenced how writing instructors took up and taught their courses. This article reflects on an instructor's experience teaching a corequisite support course during the pandemic, utilizing the concept of liminality, as basic writing scholarship draws on various…

This article describes a revision of a first-year writing program curriculum using the pillars of the Reimagining the First-Year Program. The authors adapted principles related to mindset and habits of mind from both college retention scholarship and composition scholarship. After developing a research project in order to understand what elements…

ENG 100 is a three-credit, graded course designed for students who are enrolled in ENG 110, a three-credit, single semester first year writing (FYW) course. Students in ENG 100 and 110 take six credits of FYW instruction during their first semester at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse (UWL). ENG 100 focuses on developing academic literacy…

In the context of ongoing discussions about student costs of non-credit developmental writing, this study reports on the affordances of Basic Writing as a traditional, stand-alone course at a career-focused, four-year university. Participants were students who took Basic Writing and Composition 1 between Fall 2011 and Spring 2013 (N = 2,693) in…

The purpose of this study was to research whether or not the intervention of the Reed & Kellogg System of sentence diagramming would make a significant difference in the acquisition, retention, and comprehension of the basic grammatical skills, including parts of speech, complements, phrases, clauses, and sentence structures, on the higher…

It is the scope of this article to present a theoretical framework for successful collaboration and our ideas on how it might be implemented in a first-year college composition classroom. We began by creating a collaborative assignment for our composition classes based on a very cursory understanding of successful collaboration. In light of this…