Students at Purdue have diverse academic interests and professional goals. Although not every student at Purdue is an English major or strives to become a career writer, the ability to communicate creatively and effectively is important to all of us for several reasons: (a) it provides us an outlet for sharing our ideas and an opportunity for making those ideas better; (b) it empowers us to understand different conventions, genres, groups, societies, and cultures; and (c) it allows us to have a voice in multiple academic, civic, and personal situations. In short, writing is a way of learning that spans all fields and disciplines; it is broadly defined to include many reasons for and methods of composing.

Introductory Composition at Purdue is designed to help you:

• Build confidence in your abilities to create, interpret, and evaluate texts in all types of media
• Develop knowledge and inspire new ideas through writing
• Understand, evaluate, and organize your ideas
• Understand what it means to write in different academic contexts
• Articulate, develop and support a topic through first-hand and archival research
• Become an effective writer who can respond credibly and accurately to a variety of writing situations

By requiring students to identify and interact with other members of the Purdue community, each of the assignments in the Writing Your Way into Purdue approach enables students to become more integrally involved in social action that affects them on the Purdue campus while developing their college-level writing abilities and research skills. Assignments include a memoir, a profile, a public document, an annotated bibliography and proposal, and four reviews.