Writing Program

At Northeastern, students must fulfill two writing requirements. In their first year, they take ENG 111, College Writing (or a Writing Programs equivalent); and in their �middler� or junior year they take one of the many Advanced Writing in the Disciplines course options. Students thereby receive writing instruction at two crucial developmental stages: first, as they make the transition from high school to college and face the demands of academic writing; and second, as they reach an advanced level of study in their majors and begin to prepare for work or further study that lies beyond college graduation.

The rhetorician Kenneth Burke describes academic discourse�the practices, habits, and conventions of scholarly give-and-take in the university�in this way:

Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally�s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress. The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action

We like this metaphor of the �conversation�: it gives us a way to think about the intellectual work that we do in writing courses and in other courses at Northeastern. We look forward to having you join the conversation.