The number of readings in each unit and the total number of readings in all six units of this text are designed to fit into two 16-week semesters, using five weeks per unit. The calendars below show one way to pace the readings as you build toward a culminating assignment for each unit.

Comp 1: Sample Calendar

This calendar assumes that the first assignment will be some type of personal exploration about their own writing, the second will be a rhetorical analysis of someone else’s writing, and the third will be a classic academic argument essay.

Comp 2: Sample Calendar

This calendar assumes that the first assignment will give them some kind of practice diving deeper into the writing process, the second will give them practice navigating different genres, and the third will incorporate multimodal aspects.

The samples above are the simplest way to organize the semester using the readings, but of course it’s also possible to mix things up.

For example, a Comp 2 class might center around one large multi-genre, multimodal project that spans the entire semester, broken into stages to help the students pace themselves. In that case, it might be helpful to give them some of the readings about navigating genres and multimodal projects early on.

Comp 2: Semester-Long Website Project

Below is a sample calendar in which the students spend the semester designing their own personal website on a topic of their choice—anything from a fan site about their favorite superhero to a business site for their side gig to an issue-based site drawing awareness to large-scale problems. The biggest requirement is that the website must include a minimum of three main pages and that each page must be a different genre (memoir, profile, interview, report, instructions, essay, proposal, open letter, etc.). Additional requirements might be that they also include a home page, an about page, and a certain number of blog posts.

Students are expected to continue revising everything on the website throughout the semester in order to deepen their writing process, and they are also expected to show mastery of all genre and multimodal concepts from the readings by the end of the semester. The calendar also builds in an opportunity to consult with their instructor one-on-one the week before the deadline to receive important feedback.

In this case, the order of the readings could vary since students will eventually need to apply everything to the same project, so the instructor could sequence them in whatever ways help students grasp the big ideas first and end with the most detailed aspects of the project.