Starting your journey at RIC comes with plenty of questions, and understanding the First-Year Writing Program is a great place to begin. We’ve gathered answers to the questions students ask us most often. If you don’t find what you’re looking for, feel free to reach out—we’re here to help.
All FYW courses at RIC are required to meet the same outcomes: understand effective writing as a process and understand writing as something we do in response to situations. How individual instructors choose to meet these outcomes can vary from course to course and section to section. But all FYW courses and sections, regardless of instructor, make student writing the main focus of the class. We care most about what it is you have to say and how you choose to say it.
We offer four different FYW courses, and you can choose the course that best meets your needs—FYW 100, FYW 100Plus, FYW 100Multilingual, or FYW 100Honors. Successful completion (a grade of “C” or higher) in any of these courses satisfies the College Writing Requirement, so go ahead and take the FYW Program placement survey to find out more about our courses and see which course works for you.
We call it “First-Year Writing” because students are expected to complete the course, or transfer in its equivalent, within the first year (30 credits). It is part of the first-year experience curriculum that includes First-Year Seminar (FYS). In addition, FYW is a prerequisite for other courses, and enrolling early on in your academic career will help you succeed in your future coursework.
If you think you’ve completed the equivalent of FYW elsewhere, either through college credit or test scores, take a look at our “Does the FYW Program accept transfer credit?” question.
We understand that “English” is an umbrella term used to talk about a lot of different academic disciplines and work—literature, writing, and linguistics among them. While writing about literary texts is an important skill to develop, we know that all majors engage in writing. Limiting writing instruction to just one course does not help writers develop flexible, adaptable writing habits, so FYW will help you think about writing as an activity that everyone does, all the time.
We all arrive at college with a variety of experiences with and feelings about writing, and the FYW Program is here to support everyone. That’s one reason we have small, seminar-style classes, offer four different FYW courses, and encourage students to choose which course meets their needs (see the FYW Program placement survey). In addition to courses with built-in support, like FYW 100Plus, RIC also has a Writing Lab where trained writing tutors are available to help you with your writing in every college course.
Yes, we have agreements to accept transfer credit from a variety of institutions. For example, some Rhode Island students complete URI’s WRT 104 course through their high schools; others may have enrolled in equivalent courses at CCRI, including ENGL 1010. Still others may have received scores of “3” or higher in the “Advanced Placement Language and Composition” exam. If you believe you’ve successfully completed the equivalent of FYW elsewhere, review RIC’s Transfer Evaluation System (TES) or contact the Director of Writing.
Take a look at Rhode Island College's landing page for all things writing. Here at RIC, we value writing as a means of communication, a key component in critical thinking, an area of research and inquiry, and an essential tool for activism and advocacy.