writing the essay nyu syllabus

EXPOS-UA 1 Writing the Essay

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Located within the College of Arts and Sciences, the Expository Writing Program teaches first year-required composition courses to more than 5000 NYU students across six schools, including international students and other non-native writers of English.

Regardless of which school you’re in, students in all of our first-year classes will: 

• Develop their understanding of writing as a situated practice that takes on different forms in different disciplines by writing a range of texts, each with its own genre expectations, audience, and conventions. 

Identify key elements of the essay across different writing forms, developing skill in deploying these elements in their own writing.

Take responsibility for the academic integrity of their work by honing strategies to analyze evidence, accurately represent and cite others’ ideas, and make clear the relationship between their own thinking and others’. 

Expand their awareness of their own distinct writing voices in relationship to their classroom community of writers and more broadly, a range of discourse communities.

Practice an array of reading, research, critical thinking, and writing strategies that are useful across a range of university courses in the sciences, social sciences, and the humanities.

• Practice habits of perception, inquiry, and reflection that are essential to sustained intellectual and creative endeavors. 

What is EXPOS like?

Your EXPOS class will be small (12-16 students), and driven by a sense of writing community and collective inquiry. It will be taught by a full-time faculty member dedicated to innovative and responsive teaching, who has an advanced degree from one of a multitude of fields (from anthropology to dramaturgy, primate biology to poetry), and who has thought very carefully about how the content of their discipline connects to and is enlarged by fundamental questions about rhetoric and writing. 

Our class design echoes your writing process, which is one that allows for both inductive and deductive forms of reasoning. For most lessons, you’ll complete a writing or reading exercise, most likely related to that day’s class discussion. These exercises are scaffolded, building on one another, slowly moving you towards a set of drafts for a larger graded assignment. These exercises help you develop a repertoire of techniques, like a set of dance steps, or lab assays, which you can then combine and recombine to develop a remarkably complex argument. We call this writing process—from exercise to draft to graded assignment—a  progression. Each will emphasize different writing skills and techniques that occur in essay writing, but all will help you understand the fundamentals of academic argumentation: how to pose and inquire into a problem, research and analyze evidence, anticipate the reader’s needs, and develop an idea of one’s own that clarifies its debt to others. Though you will often be offered a set of readings by your professor, it’s up to you to identify and articulate the problem you want to explore, and so each student in your class will end up developing very different arguments. You won’t know what that argument is before writing; it will form as you read, write, research, draft, and evaluate your work with your classmates and professor, redraft, and then redraft again. 

This is heady, challenging, exhilarating work. If you’ve been taught before that the essay is simply a vehicle for pre-formed or pre-ordained ideas, then you might be surprised by the sensation of writing-to-think, rather than thinking-then-writing. Our classes invite you to reimagine for yourself some of the most fundamental processes involved in reading, thinking, and writing that structure our intellectual and creative development. Many students describe our classes as transformative.

By the end of the semester, you’ll be more comfortable writing your way through not-knowing and reading difficult or opaque texts, and more accustomed to understanding theory and research as useful tools to generate insights about the world around you. You’ll feel more confident explaining how your lived experience inevitably impacts your understanding of the abstract. You will have a dramatically broader and more complex understanding of key writing principles you need throughout your time at college, like “problem,” “argument,” or “evidence.” You will have developed an array of tools to diversify your research and writing processes, heightened your awareness of genre, and grown accustomed to working with a community of your peers on complex writing and thinking tasks, with an expanded appetite for giving and receiving detailed and thoughtful feedback. As these outcomes are vital for your college experience in general, your EXPOS class is a form of writing, reading, and thinking preparation that helps you adapt to  any  new learning environment you will encounter.

Expectations for Work Students Complete Outside of Class

EWP writing classes require consistent and timely completion of reading and writing assignments. In general, you should plan for 6-7 hours per week outside of class completing this work. This is an average, and it is a standard expectation for 4-credit classes at NYU. In your writing class, you may need to allot relatively more time when you are drafting and revising an essay and relatively less time at other points in the semester. If you are finding that it takes more than this estimate of time to complete out-of-class work, please speak with your instructor. 

Please refer to your syllabus or instructor for specific expectations for EXPOS-UA 3 and EXPOS-UA 18.

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The advanced college essay: education and the professions.

Students in the Steinhardt School of Education and the School of Nursing are required to take this course. The course builds on Writing the Essay (EXPOS-UA 1) and provides advanced instruction in analyzing and interpreting written texts from a variety of academic disciplines, using written texts as evidence, developing ideas, and writing persuasive essays. It stresses analysis, inductive reasoning, reflection, revision, and collaborative learning. The course is tailored for students in the Schools of Education and Nursing so that readings and essay writing focus on issues that are pertinent to those disciplines.

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ASPPUT 2 - The World Through Art Writing the Essay

Mercer Street

Essays from the expository writing program at new york university, iris o’connor.

“ On Aerial Photography and Secret Tunnels ” (2024-2025)

English was always one of my strong suits. It was the first class to jump into my mind when an uncle or a mom’s friend asked what courses I liked most throughout elementary and high school. We studied analytical, argumentative, narrative, and expository essays in high school. How to write a page and a half in under twenty minutes, how to scan an article for what you want out of it, how to bluff. I often got told my writing was good: I knew what it took to create a beginning, middle, and end, and I knew how to throw in an extra side of thesis. It made my teachers happy and it made me content. 

My first-ever syllabus for writing the essay said this: “ Your essays were good enough to get you into NYU. Yet a high school essay is not entirely synonymous with expository writing; if you think so, then you are mistaking the species for the genus.” That was when I realized that for the past four years, I hadn’t been writing for myself, but writing for whoever it was that was grading my papers, reiterating what it was they wanted to hear. I was a grade-A, expert bullshitter.  

Progression 2: Reckoning

For this essay, I was asked to evaluate a writer’s argument by putting it into conversation with other pieces of evidence. Sounds simple, right? 

Wrong, I could barely read the first paragraph of the ‘writer’s argument’ that I was given. My mind felt as if it were molding to the cage of a corkscrew. But, after numerous journal entries, meetings with my teacher and drafts that didn’t resemble its former, I accepted the fact that maybe my essay is the record of my mind thinking on the page . 

From there, my involvement deepened, I allowed myself to include what I wrote in my journal into my essay – my honesty. I honestly didn’t understand the text and I honestly wrote about what it felt like to begin to and eventually grasp its barbarity. Maybe that’s an exaggerated word, but that’s how the essay felt to me—foreign, unknown. Through this essay, I’ve benefited from realizing that there are different distances you can take, the importance of rewatching and circling around the same territory from different distances more than once, even if you feel like you’re walking in the dark—because eventually you’ll start to notice what it is that makes that little bulb above your cranium begin to light up.

Iris Azul Enrique O’Connor is from San Francisco and is a student of the Interactive Media Arts major within the Tisch School of the Arts. She hopes to explore the realm of media and creative direction, focusing on film and mixed media art. Her freshman year English professor, Jenni Quilter, was a breath of fresh air, exposing her to the freedom to write “I” in an essay through looking inward just as well as adventuring outside personal comfort zones—and what changes in the process. Using Laura Mulvey’s feminist film theory, the essay reveals the importance of rewatching and circling around the same territory from different distances in order to gain a clear perspective on a topic. Iris uncovers truths about her youthful naivety, being a cinema-goer, while entwining her newfound realizations. 

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• Weekend Workshops - NYU High School

Creative Approaches to Writing the College Application Essay

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Writing a compelling college application essay is a significant challenge for many students. This course employs a variety of experiences, prompts, and writing exercises to help you write essays that are narratively compelling, audience directed, persuasive, and unique to each writer. Learn strategies for overcoming writer’s block, identifying audience needs, and solving problems that will serve you not only as you draft your essays, but also as you transition to college. By the end of the workshop, you will have written a complete draft of a college application essay.

• High school students in grades 9–12
• High school students interested in perfecting their college application essay

You'll Walk Away With

• A complete draft of a college application essay
• Strategies for overcoming writer’s block, identifying audience needs, and solving problems

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As a college prep program, the NYU SPS High School Academy offers a range of professional and college geared courses. Explore topics and get a feel for majors or careers you may be considering all while preparing for the college admissions and college application process.

Projects and short assignments provide take-aways that prepare you for college classroom work, while demonstrating your newly acquired skills.

All courses are $850. Please note: No financial aid, scholarships, or discounts are available for Weekend Workshops.

Application is now open!

Application Deadline for Spring Courses: Rolling admission- courses are filled on a first come, first serve basis. Final Application Deadline for Spring Courses: March 15, 2024 Class Schedule: March 16, 2024- May 11, 2024 (No class 3/30, 4/20, 4/27)

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Admissions & application.

Yes, you may apply to multiple courses. Please check the schedule for each course to verify they don’t conflict with each other.

Weekend Workshop is a selective program. Students are expected to work at the same pace as college-aged students. Students offered admission typically have a B grade point average or higher.

Yes, there is a $50 non-refundable application fee at time of application. Additionally, courses vary in tuition prices. After students are admitted, they will be registered for their selected course(s) and a tuition bill will be generated. Students must clear their balance before the first day of class.

A copy of your most recent report card or official transcript is required. The preferred method of submission is email. Please send attachments as PDF to [email protected] . Be sure to include your name in the email subject line.

Applications are accepted on a rolling basis, which means we will review and act on complete applications as they are received. We encourage you to apply early, before the course you are interested in enrolling is filled to capacity.

If your first choice is full (or closed), we will do our best to enroll you in a similar course or help you find another course of interest. Courses are available on a first-come, first-serve basis, so we encourage students to apply early.

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