What's the Difference Between ENG 101 and ENG 102 – and Which Should I Register For?

ENG 102

ENG 102 is the required first-year writing course at SUNY Oswego. It fulfills SUNY’s Basic Communication in Writing requirement, and all campuses throughout the SUNY system have an equivalent course or set of courses.

A score of 4 or 5 on the AP Language and Composition exam exempts entering students from the requirement. But if you haven’t either scored a 4 on that exam or taken a course on another campus accepted for transfer credit, you must pass ENG 102 in order to graduate from the college.

ENG 102 has lots of goals, which you can find elaborated more fully in its formal list of learning outcomes. One of the most fundamental of those goals is to make sure you can write effectively in your coursework.

Minimally, this means being able to (1) develop a meaningful claim, (2) support it in a series of effectively connected and focused discussions, (3) engage what others have said before you about the topic by finding and citing related documents effectively in your own text, and (4) polish your work in a way that demonstrates an evolving grasp of both standard written American English and the conventions of academic prose.

ENG 101

ENG 101 is a course intended for anyone who could use a semester becoming more comfortable with writing in college before taking ENG 102. It is designed to enhance your sense of focus, linearity, and general coherence in text, as well as to make you more comfortable with making meaningful claims, revising to reorganize, connect, and deepen ideas, and editing for sentence-level issues like grammar, mechanics, and sentence structure.

ENG 101 and 102 for Students Whose First Language is Not English

There are sections of both ENG 101 and 102 specifically for students whose first language is not English, in which special attention is given to second-language issues. If you feel you might profit from one of these courses, you will find them marked as "International" in the course availability list each semester.

So Which Course Should I Enroll In?

First-year advisors typically make recommendations about which course to take, but generally students are free to sign up for whichever course they choose.

Here are some questions we recommend asking yourself to help you decide:

Do you often have trouble recognizing a topic or claim when you write – so that you typically feel like you’re wandering and have a hard time keeping focused on a single idea or train of thought?
Do you have trouble elaborating on an idea, so that it’s difficult to generate more than a paragraph or so on a topic?
Do you have trouble stringing together sentences in ways that seem to move forward and lead somewhere – especially when you’re developing ideas rather than telling stories?
Are you often unsure of how to structure individual sentences – how their pieces fit together?
Do your readers often have trouble understanding what you mean?
When you read, do you have trouble understanding the writer’s purpose, even in relatively short texts?

If your answer to two or more of these questions is yes, we recommend that you consider enrolling in ENG 101.

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