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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 writing that is advanced.

“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 related to writing over the curriculum. This definition that is broad usually the one adopted because of the Journal of Advanced Composition with its early years of publication” (Encyclopedia of English Studies and Language Arts, 1994).

Examples and Observations

• “a beneficial many educators utilize the term advanced composition to refer 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 is ever going to reach consensus about advanced composition, nor would most teachers want some type of monologic, universal method and course. What is certain is the fact that advanced composition keeps growing in popularity, both among students and instructors, and it remains an area that is active of.”? (Gary A. Olson, “Advanced Composition.” Encyclopedia of English Studies and Language Arts, ed. by Alan C. Purves. Scholastic Press, 1994)
• “Teaching advanced composition should become more than simply a ‘harder’ freshman course. If advanced composition is 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 linked to composition that is freshman. The ‘harder’ approach achieves just the that is 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 count on formulas; their prose is full of too many 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 to move students from proficiency to effectiveness.”? (Elizabeth Penfield, “Freshman English/Advanced Writing: Just how can We Distinguish the 2?” 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 it has 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, plus the self–at which writing assumes particular importance. . . . Although relatively few students choose to write poetry within my current composition that is advanced, it seems for me that students’ attempts at poetic composition are considerably enriched essay writers by their integration into a sustained inquiry about how exactly a variety of writing actually function in the world.”? (Tim Mayers, Rewriting Craft: Composition, Creative Writing, plus the Future of English. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005)

“for some 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 for these two composition classes. The structure that is basic of syllabi for the two classes was also similar, as were the assignments. And I also used the same text as well . . .. Students in advanced composition wrote longer essays than first-year students, but which was the difference that is primary the two courses.

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

In this class we will discuss questions such as for instance these even as we come together to be far better, self-confident, and self-conscious writers. As it is the actual situation with composition classes that are most, we’re going to work as a writing workshop–talking about the writing process, working collaboratively on work in progress. But we shall also inquire together in what has reached stake whenever we write: we are going to explore, put differently, the tensions that inevitably result as soon as we desire to express our ideas, to claim an area for ourselves, in along with communities that will or may not share our assumptions and conventions. And we will think about the implications of the explorations for such concepts that are rhetorical voice and ethos.”

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