When we were assigned to attend the first week of COMPOCON I was a bit hesitant about it because I had never attended a writing convention before or even knew what it was going to be about. I didn't know how helpful it would be. I just thought the COMPOCON sessions were going to be covering what I already knew. Although COMPOCON was more like a small convention of information for English students. The first COMPOCON event of 2015 was an all week event in which you went and ex

By Krystina Ortiz and Antonio Salinas Attending Compocon opened our eyes to the intricate processes that occur at each step of the writing process. We hope to give you a taste of what we experienced and we hope that this will help students in their writing endeavors of First Year Composition. Compocon is a series of sessions that sets out to teach first year composition students their different options they can use in helping with their writing and aims to give students a b

by Sylvia Perez Sylvia Perez won last years Distinguished Speakers Essay Contest. In the essay below Perez describers her process for writing the essay that won her the oppurtunity to have dinner with the award-winning journalist & author Laura Ling. On the night of September 19, 2014 I sat down at my dining room table and stared at a prompt for an essay contest. The winner would personally meet and have dinner with journalist and author Laura Ling. This was the prompt:

By Melanie Leo Transforming Your Essay by Using One Basic Technique Every writer would love to see a huge “A+” on their essay assignments, however, how would they achieve that grade? A simple writing tool can transform their essay into a greater one. Writing an essay is no easy task to do, especially when you are unsure of where to start and what to write. Rough drafting is a technique in which you put down your ideas in an essay and edit it from there; it is widely u