This is the impossibly long version of the
Full Syllabus required by the PWR
I recommend you open its constituent five parts separately, but if you gotta, here’s the whole thing:
1. Course Description
2. Policies and Requirements
3. Progression I
4. Progression II
5. Progression III
Dr. Jay Ellis
Fall 2012 WRTG 1150; T/Th Section 083 (12:30-1:45) and Section 087 (2:00-3:15) HUMN1B45
Office: Program for Writing and Rhetoric, 1B27C
(Basement of Environmental Design Building: Walk through the PWR lobby;
find the cubicles and walk past them all; my office is just to the right)
Office Hours:
by appointment T/Th 11:15-12:15,
and by appointment some T/Th from 3:15 pm, many Wednesdays, and some Fridays; no Monday appointments.
Email (only for appointments):
Note: To schedule a meeting, please ask in class or write a regular email to me. I keep far more than the minimum three office hours a week, on average, but to schedule extra hours (when possible) I may meet with you at a nearby cafe, etc. So, write to confirm a time and place. I greatly value office hours and prefer to meet with students to discuss the course. For this reason, I may not return emails that are not specifically requesting a meeting with me.
WRTG 1150:
First Year Writing and Rhetoric
Course Description
The written word is a sieve.
Only so much of reality gets through as fits the size and shape of the screen,
and in some ways that is never enough.
—Kenneth Rexroth
The laurel wreath is worn only in the moment of writing.
—Robert Giroux
Description for First Year Courses in the Program for Writing and Rhetoric
This course introduces you to college-level academic writing. The course emphasizes thinking, reading, researching, and writing critically—more than merely “getting the content” of a text, you will learn also to study:
· significant points and arguments in a text and various interpretations of the same text
· structure and rhetoric of a text (we will define the term “rhetoric” during the course of the semester)
· ideologies, assumptions, and beliefs underlying a text.
As stated in Knowing Words, this course should help you:
· write with fluency; to acquire a practical and reflective understanding of the writing process
· develop rhetorical knowledge, making informed choices as you adapt your writing to the needs of your audience, to a specific context and situation, and for a particular purpose
· become a proficient reader, approaching texts with a writer’s awareness of craft and a critic’s ability to interpret and respond to a text’s meaning and effects
· develop strategies of research that will enable you to become an active investigator of your culture
· understand and apply conventions of standard linguistic usage, including proper grammar, syntax, punctuation, and spelling as you compose, revise, and edit your writing across a range of rhetorical tasks and genres.
(See Knowing Words pages 1 - 6 for more information about the course description and goals.)
Description for This Section of the Course
This course may be the most difficult you take in college, and in our large university, this class may be the smallest you have. Ours is a writing workshop: you will learn from each other as well as from me (probably more so), because after this semester, I won’t be around to help you, but your fellow students and the habits you build here will.
We will focus on the process of writing, on close reading, and on appropriate scholarship for your other classes and for better research in your daily life as a citizen. This course is crucial to your work in most other courses in college.
Rather than regarding writing as a mode of proper conduct, where I correct your “mistakes,” we will instead develop a sense of writing as a skill, an art, and even sometimes like fashion: there’s no single correct way to dress yourself; all depends on where you’re going that day and whom you expect to see there. So, forget your worries about “who” and “whom” (just use “who,” unless you’re British or you teach writing), and get ready to learn how to write better, how to read better, and how to do scholarship that is more thorough than what you now know how to do.
Because we eschew moral metaphors for writing, and because we have not (yet) been replaced by robots, we will work in “Progressions” (rather than “Lessons,” “Units,” or “Modules”) this semester. It is not the case, however, that because we will avoid the words “bad” and “good” we have no standards; this is a tough course. What we want is what works within a particular rhetorical situation. What you now know how to do (in writing, reading, and research) no doubt works for some situations. Now it’s time to move to a better ability in those situations. You’ll therefore want to equip yourself with skills for situations you have not yet mastered.
Our three Progressions should therefore move you to greater facility in each of three areas, and to provide you with an accumulated set of complementary skills: you will learn to blur the distinction between reading and writing, to revise radically, to dig and dig through online and physical research materials—which will include significant time in the library, and probably to spend more time on your writing that you ever have before. Whatever your level of writing ability at the beginning of the semester, we will expect you to improve that ability, in your own way, and within reasonable boundaries in the writing you will need for a successful college career, and a successful life.
Information Literacy
Students in this version of WRTG 1150 will improve on their abilities to locate and incorporate strong evidence for their arguments:
· Go beyond argument as a matter of simply taking one side or another.
· Listen to counter-argument, and even when refuting a counter-argument to consider a shift in terminology to genuinely change opinions.
· Use both traditional paper sources, possibly including archival research, and computers for finding all sources including full-text online text and multi-modal resources.
· Bring other voices to the surface of argument (i.e. to move away from book-report citation where appropriate).
· Further develop attribution techniques appropriate to various style manuals for a variety of disciplinary requirements.
· Translate, as it were, expert sources originally created for relatively narrow discourse communities for both wider—interdisciplinary—audiences within academia, and where appropriate, for general lay audiences.
Technology
Students in this version of WRTG 1150 will use all available and appropriate technologies for their work:
· No special skill with computers is assumed, or necessary, for success in this section.
· This section makes no special claims of a focus on technology, but rather incorporates the tools students use for all their college work inside, as well as outside, our classroom.
· The course should nonetheless improve the computer skills of every student, including techniques for research, composition, revision, and peer review likely to be new to most students.
· Computers in the classroom will allow us to both model and perform work for the course, rather than merely talking about work to be done only outside the classroom.
· Overhead projection of course materials, including readings and rhetorical exercises, and also student work as examples, will supplement traditional means of visually reinforcing our work.
· When helpful to do so, we will turn off our screens and ignore computers the better to speak face to face.
· Students are allowed to bring their own laptops to use in lieu of the classroom’s computers.
Multi-Modal Rhetorics
Students in this version of WRTG 1150 may work on visual and multi-modal texts, in addition to poems, short stories, novels, essays, and traditional scholarly publications:
· Course texts may include documentary television or other multi-modal texts, including instruction on how to close read television and film both visually and aurally; work on multi-modal texts goes beyond quoting words and may include criticism of accompanying music, general employment of sound, and the visual rhetoric of such texts.
· The final project for the course could include composition of multi-modal rhetoric for particular student project.
Progression I: Somebody’s Body: Close Reading Stories of Mayhem, Medicine, and the Body (and Mind) Transformed
This progression delves into reading and writing Creative Nonfiction, while also allowing students some research in the Medical Humanities. We begin with writing personal narratives of medical mishap—accident, illness, etc—and readings from the surgeon and Creative Nonfiction writer Richard Selzer. In this way, we will develop individual skills in narrative nonfiction as well as analytical abilities in working with someone else’s writing. The final Creative Nonfiction essay for this progression will combine a relatively brief close reading of Selzer—or another writer in the Medical Humanities—with narrative evidence to develop an idea or feeling about health, its absence, and our various curative traditions.
Progression II: My Generation, Your Generation, What Generation?
Our most extensive progression accomplishes critical inquiry through research, but the writer’s voice remains welcome. We will first explore together the problematic rhetorical topoi around generational difference (real and imagined). Students will then develop individual projects pursuing a question at issue involving generational identity (which could but does not have to include generational difference). All projects will include extensive scholarly research and will address a clearly identified scholarly audience, though this may include a general interdisciplinary audience at the university level.
Progression III: Civic Rhetoric
Students are encouraged to range widely after determining a particular problem concerning a larger civic audience. This is your chance to bring your major discipline to an editorial, proposal, familiar essay, or journalism “think piece,” even as you are encouraged to conduct research well outside that major. We will consider the tension between two apparently opposing truths: all politics is local, and yet global issues always include local problems; even in the most “local” rhetorical situation, we will see how considerations elsewhere may reveal analogous solutions. Finally, the importance of a finely tuned sense of audience will complete our focus on rhetorical strategies as inherent in successful public writing.
Policies and Requirements
for WRTG 1150
Required Texts
Dictionary: Preferably a college-level desk or CD ROM edition (American Heritage 3rd ed. is excellent) including usage examples, and one portable. “Dictionary.com” provides American Heritage definitions—but with advertising, and you must be online. For the new, 5th edition (in electronic form or with print also): http://ahdictionary.com/.
Program for Writing and Rhetoric, CU-Boulder. Knowing Words. Fountainhead Press, [most recent edition].
Graff, Gerald and Cathy Birkenstein. They Say, I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing. NY: Norton, 2010.
Some other texts are available by D2L online link, handout, course packet, or by electronic or paper reserve at Norlin Library, as announced. Most of your reading will be the result of your own research. See each Progression (Syllabus) for bibliographies and availability of all texts.
Grading
See the “Grading Guidelines” at the bottom of this page for explanation of letter grades. You may schedule an appointment with me during office hours at any time for a general indication of how you are doing in the course. Even before I’ve finished grading essays, I am happy to look over your work at any time with you during an office hour appointment and give you a clear indication—within a letter grade—of how you’re doing.
Progression I Personal Essay 10%
Progression II Scholarly Essay 20%
Progression III Civic Oral Presentation 10%
Progression III Civic Written Project 10%
Information Literacy (Research, and Library Exercises) 10%
Attendance and Active Participation
(in Discussions, In-Class Exercises, and Workshop)[1] 15%
Peer Critiques 10%
Overall Progression Grade
(How Much Have You Improved in This Course?) 15%
Course Description[2]
This course is designed to help you learn not how to write, or how to write correctly, but how to write effectively. This means that you must learn how to read well, and how to read with an eye on the techniques used by professional writers to convey difficult ideas. It is a course with much appreciation for the writing process, but with greater value placed on the results of that process. You are not here to do what you already know how to do. Rather, by beginning with your existing reading and writing practices, we will move toward a better understanding of the variety of writing processes, the complexity of worthwhile arguments, the value of good research, and the rewards of dogged revision. To improve your skills in Critical Thinking means not only improving your Critical Reading and Writing skills, but also to add some practice in oral rhetoric, so we will conclude our semester with both a written argument in Civic Rhetoric, and an Oral Presentation. Finally, throughout the course you will learn the background language of all good argument as we employ the terminology of rhetorical studies in making our arguments, critiquing each other’s arguments, and ultimately improving those arguments.
See the Progression Syllabi specific to our course section for more information on the course theme. All serious writing courses require discussion of ideas as well as of process and technique. Your active engagement with difficult ideas is assumed.[3]
Progressions
Our semester will be divided into three stages, with each stage intended to help you master critical skills in the course, and each focused on a particular aspect of our topic. Our movement toward the goals of each stage is called a progression because you are expected not simply to improve by repetition, but to improve through a movement from one way of doing things to another, generally more complex, way of doing things. Our use of this as a spatial metaphor for improvement also helps us avoid the useless worry of moral language about writing (such as the concept of “errors”—a foolish and class-bound way to think about writing that doesn’t work or that is inappropriate for a particular audience or genre), and to focus instead on competency, skill, and facility. If you cannot commit to earnestly improving your writing through multiple drafts, beginning with a serious draft (more than something tossed off to meet the prompt), and working through several significant—perhaps radical—revisions, you should find another section of the course.
Peer Review and Self-Assessment
This particular version of 1150 First Year Writing and Rhetoric departs significantly from standard traditional practices in most composition classrooms. The goal of a writing class ought to be the learning of more effective techniques for writing, research, and revision, even more than it is improved final drafts for that class; otherwise, we may seem to improve the writing in your assignments, but we may have taught you nothing you use in the rest of your writing life. The goal of a class in rhetoric ought to be improved argument; this, too, is usually not arrived at by the student merely doing exactly what the teacher tells her to do on page two. In 38 years of performance, no music teacher ever took my sticks away and re-played what he thought I ought to have played, and yet a similar practice pervades much writing instruction. The highest goals are often missed—not out of any lack of good intentions on the part of most writing teachers, but rather because tradition does not always arrive at best practices. Writing teachers are usually very nice people who cannot bear to see students write “mistakes.” But “correcting” those “mistakes” is not the same as teaching a writer lessons that will last a lifetime.