Hi, and welcome to our site!

<-----> We are two sections of English 1303, the first semester of Freshman Composition at the University of Houston main campus. Our objective in constructing this site is to share descriptions of Houston and the University with students at Jackson Community College in Hillsdale, Michigan. As we discovered from researching Hillsdale and JCC online, our lives and experiences differ in significant ways, as these writings will plainly show. Yet there are commonalities in the stresses and rewards of student life, as some of the writings will also show. Our objective was to create a vivid picture of what it's like to be a student at a university in the fourth-largest city in the country. These writings reflect the down side of that experience—the crowds, the traffic, the noise and pollution—as well as the things that make life in Houston exciting: the diversity, the variety, and the opportunities.

<-----> These paragraphs were written in response to an assignment early in the fall semester, 2004. Students were asked to write “contrasting descriptions”—that is, one paragraph that offers an appealing or positive description of a place or scene, and a second that uses a shift in perspective to create a negative or unappealing description of the same scene. Writers were encouraged to show rather than tell , making their writing vivid with sensory and figurative language. There are nearly fifty students between the two sections, and each student wrote two paragraphs; therefore, rather than sending one hundred paragraphs, we worked collaboratively to select the paragraphs we would send on. Small work groups reviewed six to eight paragraphs each and nominated the ones they wanted to send on. In some cases, both paragraphs by a writer were selected, while in other cases, one paragraph was deemed stronger than the other, so only the positive or the negative paragraph was chosen. Then we workshopped many of the chosen paragraphs as a class, and writers solicited additional help from their classmates, their TA's, and from me. The resulting paragraphs are truly a collaborative effort. They are also a work in progress, and we welcome suggestions and recommendations on ways to make them even stronger. We also look forward to hearing what life is like for students in Hillsdale!