What is College Writing?

College writing is . . .

• Formal: It follows an agreed-upon set of rules that help create communication.
• Scholarly: It uses information from established scholars and always gives credit to those scholars.
• Professional: It strictly adheres to standard English grammar and spelling, avoiding slang and cliché, and alternate spellings. This doesn’t mean college writing can’t be personal, but it should always be professional first!

The Structure of a College Essay

The Idea of an Essay

An essay carries meaning in five major channels:

1. The Message — The basic meaning of any essay is simply what you have to say. Sounds easy, but you have to know your message before you begin. One common mistake is to just start writing with the expectation that great ideas will simply emerge. That can happen. We call that Freewriting, but often a good idea takes time to develop.
2. The Organization — Just as words in a sentence must appear in order if anyone is to understand them. The same is true for essays. If we release ideas to flow in any order, the result can be chaotic and incomprehensible. Instead, the best plan is to plan! Capture your ideas and get them in an order that makes sense to you.
3. The Personality — Also called your writing Style, the ingredient in your writing that is uniquely you is just as important as any other part of your meaning. No one can express your ideas in quite the same way you can, which helps break up the old myth that professional writers can say things better than you. Style is so important that it gets an entire section of this textbook.
4. Mechanics — This channel is what most people think about (and dread) when they think about a writing class. It include spelling, capitalization, punctuation, and grammar. If you felt a twinge of stress from just reading that list, you’re not alone! Most people find mechanics stressful and use their low grammar confidence to claim that they are “bad at writing.” But that’s almost never the case! If you made it into this class, you are fluent in English! That means the mechanics are already coming naturally for you. So we won’t worry too much about them. In fact, this textbook has no grammar lessons! Isn’t that nice?
5. Format — Also called Formal Style, this feature makes college writing scholarly writing. Format refers to the system of referencing, citing, and listing outside sources written by other scholars. It also deals with how the physical document is set up, including margins, spacing, font, headers, footers, and more. Formal Style usually gets managed by professional organizations. Famous examples include MLA (the Modern Language Association), APA (the American Psychological Association), and CMS (the Chicago Manual of Style). This class will rely on MLA because it’s often considered the easiest to use.

The parts of a College Essay:

Take a moment to examine the chart below. It shows how all language, writing in particular, gets organized in use.

The Complete Sentence

The first of these structures, the complete sentence, should come pretty naturally to you, so we will only offer a brief definition.

A complete sentence contains both a subject and a verb. The simplest complete sentences contain only a subject and a verb:

• I went.
• He drives.
• We ate.

But sentences can become much more complex than that. The only reminder is to make sure all of your sentences still have a subject and verb, no matter how long (or short) they are!