English Composition is a core course in the first-year curriculum of the Smolny Associate Program. It is designed to enhance students’ ability to use English as a tool for critical thinking, idea development, and academic writing. It aims to strengthen their skills in articulating thoughts and arguments clearly, cohesively, and persuasively while also developing their ability to understand and engage with the perspectives and arguments of others. The course emphasizes both form and content, exploring the relationship between language structure and effective expression. The course is for non-native speakers who will be writing in English as a foreign language, just as most people who write in English nowadays. Our goal is to give students an understanding that writing in a foreign language is a form of freedom. For centuries there has existed a language of intellectual expression, and at this moment it is English. For this reason, a lot of the texts included in the reading are translated into English from other languages.