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Advanced composition is a university-level course in expository writing beyond the first-year or level that is introductory. Also known as advanced writing.

“In its broadest sense,” says Gary A. Olson, “advanced composition refers to all postsecondary writing instruction over the first-year level, including courses in technical, business, and advanced expository writing, as well as classes associated with writing across the curriculum. This definition that is broad the main one adopted by the Journal of Advanced Composition with its early many years of publication” (Encyclopedia of English Studies and Language Arts, 1994).

Examples and Observations

• “a beneficial many educators use the term advanced composition to mention specifically to a junior- or senior-level composition course concerned more with writing as a whole than with how writing functions in particular disciplines.
  “It is unlikely that compositionists will ever reach consensus about advanced composition, nor would most teachers want some kind of monologic, universal method and course. What is certain is that advanced composition continues to grow in popularity, both among students and instructors, plus it remains an active part professional custom essays of scholarship.”? (Gary A. Olson, “Advanced Composition.” Encyclopedia of English Studies and Language Arts, ed. by Alan C. Purves. Scholastic Press, 1994)
• “Teaching advanced composition should be more than simply a ‘harder’ freshman course. If advanced composition is always to have any viability after all, it must be founded on a theory that (1) shows how advanced composition is significantly diffent in kind from freshman composition and (2) shows how advanced composition is developmentally related to freshman composition. The ‘harder’ approach achieves only the latter.”? (Michael Carter, “What Is Advanced About Advanced Composition?: A Theory of Expertise written down.” Landmark Essays on Advanced Composition, ed. by Gary A. Olson and Julie Drew. Lawrence Erlbaum, 1996)

• “Students who enroll in advanced writing courses write with proficiency yet often depend on formulas; their prose is stuffed with a lot of words and weighed down with nominalizations, passives, prepositional phrases. Their writing lacks focus, details, and a feeling of audience . . .. The aim of an advanced writing course, therefore, is always to move students from proficiency to effectiveness.”? (Elizabeth Penfield, “Freshman English/Advanced Writing: how can We Distinguish the Two?” Teaching Advanced Composition: Why andHow , ed. by Katherine H. Adams and John L. Adams. Boynton/Cook, 1991)

Sites of Contention

“My advanced composition courses currently function not just as ‘skills’ courses but additionally as sustained inquiries into how functions that are writingand has now functioned) politically, socially, and economically in the field. Through writing, reading, and discussion, my students and I give attention to three ‘sites of contention’–education, technology, together with self–at which writing assumes particular importance. . . . Although relatively few students elect to write poetry within my current advanced composition courses, it seems for me that students’ attempts at poetic composition are considerably enriched by their integration into a sustained inquiry about how precisely all kinds of writing actually function in the field.”? (Tim Mayers, Rewriting Craft: Composition, Creative Writing, while the Future of English. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005)

“For most of my first eleven years at Oregon State University–the years during that I taught both first-year and advanced composition–I wrote identical course descriptions of these two composition classes. The structure that is basic of syllabi when it comes to two classes was also similar, as were the assignments. And I also used the text that is same well . . .. Students in advanced composition wrote longer essays than first-year students, but which was the primary difference between the two courses.

“The syllabus for my fall term 1995 advanced composition class . . . Raises issues that are new. The writing that follows begins utilizing the paragraph that is second of course overview:

In this class we’re going to discuss questions such as for example these once we come together in order to become more effective, self-confident, and self-conscious writers. As it is the situation with composition classes that are most, we will function as a writing workshop–talking about the writing process, working collaboratively on operate in progress. But we are going to also inquire together in what is at stake as soon as we write: we are going to explore, to phrase it differently, the tensions that inevitably result once we need to express our ideas, to claim a place for ourselves, in along with communities which could or may well not share our assumptions and conventions. And we will think about the implications of those explorations for such concepts that are rhetorical voice and ethos.”

(Lisa S. Ede, Situating Composition: Composition Studies together with Politics of Location. Southern Illinois University Press, 2004)