Dear all

Having a PhD from the US but (being British and) now teaching in the UK, I've long thought there were a few aspects of US university education that we should emulate over here. One of them is the composition course; courses like that, that simply teach students how to write, are very rare here in my experience. There are doubtless various reasons for that, but, to cut to the chase, my own university may now be introducing an academic unit that could host a composition course--so I would like to propose one. So there's my question:

I'd be grateful for recommendations of composition-course materials (preferably online for easy sharing) that I could use to knock up an outline of such a course, and to show to the powers-that-be that it would be really good to have one.

Thanks a lot!

Damien

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Damien Hall
Newcastle University (UK)
(French) Linguistics
Tel. +44 191 208 8521

PS My two-penn'orth about why we don't have composition courses here. I wrote it in the message body and then relegated it down here because tl;dr, but here it is, if you're interested.

We could debate the reasons, and they're doubtless complex, but I think one of the major ones is the lack of liberal arts here. UK university education at all levels is much more subject-directed right from the start. You apply at age 17 for degrees in a particular subject or range of subjects, so that's what you do, and you concentrate on gathering knowledge in those subjects. There is therefore no (or little) concept that writing well might be a good thing to be able to do in and of itself; students are expected to pick up how to do it as they go along, in a way that might be relevant to just their subject or might be more general. There are certainly Writing Development Centres within universities, but it's not obligatory to use them (they wouldn't have the manpower if everyone did, anyway), and in my experience the students see them as a remedial measure which (if they're a native English-speaker, anyway) they don't have to use.