First-Year Composition Program

At the heart of the English Department’s First-Year Composition Program (FYCP) are several 100-level writing-intensive courses designed to satisfy GE Area A2 Written Communication and GE Area A3 Critical Thinking and Communication. These courses have been designed by the talented and committed lecturing faculty who primarily teach them, with guidance and support from the department’s FYCP Coordinator. The courses are:

Area A2
ENGL 131 Writing and Rhetoric Stretch (Part I)
ENGL 132 Writing and Rhetoric Stretch (Part II)
ENGL 133 Multilingual Writing and Rhetoric
ENGL 134 Writing and Rhetoric

Area A3
ENGL 145 Writing Arguments
ENGL 1146 Critical Thinking through Cultural Literacies (new for 2026-27 Catalog)
ENGL 147 Writing Arguments about STEM
ENGL 1148 Critical Thinking for Technical Writers (new for 2026-27 Catalog)

Fresh Voices: Composition at Cal Poly

FYCP publishes Fresh Voices: Composition at Cal Poly. An annual collection of student writing, Fresh Voices includes dozens of essays across several different genres commonly taught in the program, all written by Cal Poly students in FYCP courses from the previous academic year.

All Area A2 course sections use Fresh Voices as the main course textbook, so students are constantly reading, discussing, analyzing, and learning from the writing of their published peers. Students come to see how other first-year students have imagined and responded to the same kinds of rhetorical situations they’ll be facing in their own writing: writing stories about past experiences, writing about communities, and writing about urgent public issues that impact them. Learn more about Fresh Voices.

You can explore back issues of Fresh Voices: Composition at Cal Poly through Cal Poly's DigitalCommons.

Graduate Teaching Associates Program

FYCP also supports the English Department’s Graduate Teaching Associate Program. All Graduate TAs are assigned one section of ENGL 134 Writing and Rhetoric each term during their second year in the M.A. program. To support their work, the FYCP Coordinator typically teaches two graduate seminars that train and support them. ENGL 505 Composition Theory introduces graduate students to the histories and theories of post-secondary writing instruction. ENGL 506 Pedagogical Approaches to Composition serves as a teaching practicum for newly hired TAs as they teach for the first time. Learn more about the Graduate TA Program.