English 391, Section 0502: Advanced Composition
Computer and Space Sciences Building 0201, MWF 1-1:50
Instructor: Justin Lohr
Office Location: Tawes 2232
Office Hours: Th 10:00-12:00, 2:00-4:00 or by appointment
Email:
“Why am I here?”
In this Advanced Composition course, you will practice the writing and composition skills most often employed in life beyond academia. Our focus will be on adapting previously learned writing and rhetorical skills for “real world” audiences. Specifically, employers consistently say that strong writing skills are of paramount importance when they evaluate potential candidates. It is no wonder, for you will need to produce professional quality documents, such as resumes, reports (both written and oral), memoranda, and e-mails, the quality of which reflect on you and your employer. As such, I will expect all of your communication with me to reflect professional formats and conventions, including email.
“All right, so what are the details?”
Our classroom will be a professional environment, so we will often conduct our course in a seminar style—I hope our meetings will be rich in discussion and practical in focus. While I’ve taught composition for years and have much to give you in experience and praxis, I will also expect quite a bit from you. I will trust your intellect and do the work of helping you shape written discourse on the subjects from which you’ve chosen to fashion your life. And, in our classroom and through the trajectory of linked research assignments, I hope you will bring your expert field knowledge to bear on weighty issues in your chosen discipline.
You will have your choice of topic for class research, and we will spend our first weeks establishing interests. I will expect you to take risks and ask (and answer!) challenging questions about the world around you. I will suggest that you choose something with gravitas: a problem you see on campus (i.e. gender politics on campus), in your community (i.e. a public safety issue that needs addressing), or in your chosen field (i.e. reduced funding for humanities). While these topics may include big, abstract, or theoretical underpinnings, they should also address practical, administrative, logistical concerns wherever possible. So, while they may be aligned with work done in your other classes, they will also provide real world, localized solutions. Be prepared to focus on these topics in depth and for extended periods of time. These topics should be meet three criteria at once: 1) genuine interest and imagination, 2) relation to your planned profession, 3) feasibility of potential solutions.
Additionally, I’ve shaped this course around evolving genres and mediums. Slam poetry is writing. Think pieces are writing. Web pages are writing. Commercials are writing. Our assignments will not simply be “papers,” because real world writing is not comprised of a string of papers. But argument remains at the core of the pieces we’ll write. We will survey students on campus, create a website, write an Op-Ed, create a visual argument (either video or print), write job/graduate school application materials, and complete a final proposal to send to a real world audience.
Expect to attend class every day, to write and rewrite your papers, and to read and comment on the writing of your classmates. Goal-wise, you can expect to:
· Analyze a variety of professional rhetorical situations and produce appropriate texts, adapting the text to the knowledge base of the audience
· Produce persuasive texts that reflect the degree of available evidence and take into account counter arguments
· Understand and practice the skills needed to produce competent, professional writing including planning, drafting, revising and editing
· Identify and implement appropriate research methods for each writing task
· Practice the ethical use of sources and the conventions of citation appropriate in your field
· Improve competence in Standard Written English (including grammar, sentence and paragraph structure, coherence and document design) and use this knowledge to revise texts
“So those are the goals. How do I get there?”
Improving your writing requires working simultaneously on different skills in different ways, so English 391 includes the following activities:
· Engagement– Just being physically present in class won’t cut it. You are expected to be an active and engaged participant in class discussions as well as during small group and individual exercises. You will receive a two-week “grace period” in order to become acclimated to the classroom environment; during this period, I will not grade participation. After this grace period, however, I will grade participation on a weekly basis. *Also, please note that cell phones are to be off and out of sight during class. If I see you using one during class, you will lose all participation points for the day. Trust me, that text can wait.*
· Writing “Journal”: Once upon a time, a young Henry David Thoreau walked up to Ralph Waldo Emerson and told Emerson that he wanted to be a writer. Emerson’s first piece of advice? “Keep a journal.” Journaling is an essential part of the writing process; it is a place where you can be sloppy and messy and scrawl out the crude ideas that you will later refine into more formal arguments. (Another analogy for writing: cooking. You can’t make a meal without ingredients, and these initial ideas are those ingredients. You want your pantry as well stocked as it can be when it comes time to write your major assignments.)
While I do not require you to have a formal journal, I do expect you to keep a two-pocket folder in which you will store all responses (both those written in class and those written at home) as well as all exercises done in class because these responses and exercises will be the foundation of the formal assignments for the class. At various points in the semester, you will use the various materials in your folder to help you in brainstorming, organizing, and drafting your work. Keep all of your work for this class; you never know when an exercise or idea from three papers ago will help you with your current assignment.
In-class writing will often, though not always, be collected and read. Homework will always be collected and graded, evaluated not only on completion, but also on how well it was done.
· Peer editing – you will be responsible for reading and responding to the work of your classmates.
· Formal assignments – will include papers and one digital project
Texts (required):
Ramage, John D., Bean, John C., and June Johnson. Writing Arguments: A Rhetoric with Readings. Brief 10th Edition. Boston: Pearson, 2016 [ISBN: 978-0-321-90673-1]
NOTE: Some course readings will be posted to the course Canvas site. As soon as you are able, please check to make sure you can access the course website. If not, please let me know as soon as possible. You may either print readings or bring a laptop to class. If you choose the latter, however, I expect that you will use the laptop only to access class readings, not to send e-mails or chat or anything else. Please take notes in a separate notebook (not in a word processor) to avoid any confusion. Also, any time we have reading assigned for a class, please bring the texts with you to class. We will often consult them over the course of the class period.
“So far, so good. What else?”
1. Regular and punctual attendance. The writing you will do in English 391 will be based on skills you will develop and hone in class; for that reason, your attendance and participation will have a direct effect on your work and, ultimately, your grades. If you miss class for any reasons, it will be your responsibility to find out what you missed and how you can make up the work. Your engagement grade and the quality of your work will suffer if you miss class. You are also expected to arrive on time; if you are late, you will disrupt class, and your engagement grade will suffer. Also, you may miss the day’s warm-up writing exercise, meaning additional lost points.
*Unexcused, or “Discretionary,” Absences: Discretionary absences should be viewed not as “free days” but as days you may need to deal with emergencies, such as taking your little brother to the doctor, dealing with a flat tire, taking relatives to the airport, etc. You may miss two full weeks of class (six days) without substantial penalty—you will, however, lose engagement points for those missed classes. For each unexcused absence after the sixth, your final grade will be lowered by one full letter grade.
*Excused Absences: The University excuses absences for certain reasons (illness, representing the University at certain events, religious observances, and the death of an immediate family member), provided the cause of absence is appropriately documented.
If you have, or will have, an excused absence (such as your mandatory presence at a University event), you must let me know ahead of time or as soon as possible. No absence is officially excused, however, until I have seen the documentation. Documentation must be presented no later than the first class period after your return to class—you have, in other words, one class day’s leeway to get your documentation in order. If you do not supply documentation within the specified time period, your absence will be regarded as unexcused. Please make one copy of your documentation for me to keep and keep another copy for your own records.
*Religious Observances: The University's policy "Assignments and Attendance on Dates of Religious Observance" provides that students should not be penalized because of observances of their religious beliefs; students shall be given an opportunity, whenever feasible, to make up within a reasonable time any academic assignment that is missed because of individual participation in religious observances. Students are responsible for obtaining material missed during their absences. Furthermore, students have the responsibility to inform the instructor of any intended absences for religious observances in advance. The student should provide written notification to the professor within the first two weeks of the semester. The notification must identify the religious holiday(s) and the date(s).
*Documentation Requirements to Justify an Excused Absence: Documentation must justify absence for the specific period missed: a vague statement that you were “under [a doctor’s] care during the week of X” won’t do. Ask your doctor to be specific about times and physical limitations. The Student Health Service will give out medical excuses only for long-term ailments. If you have an illness for which you went to the Student Health Service, contact me right away about how to present appropriate documentation.
If you must miss two class periods in a row, you must contact me before the second class period so we can begin thinking about how you will make up work.
2. Late Papers -- Papers are due at the beginning of class on the day they are due; otherwise, they are late. Late papers will be marked down one letter grade per class late. If you must hand a paper in late, you must also contact me the day the paper is due, so that I know when to expect your paper and so that we can make arrangements for delivery (whether you’ll give it to me in class, or deliver it to my office, etc.)
3. Writing Workshops -- Every great writer is also a great reader, and analyzing the choices that others have made is one of the best methods for developing your own skill as a writer. For each assignment, we will have a draft workshop before your paper is due. The class before the workshop, you will bring enough copies of your rough draft for each of your group members to have one. You will exchange drafts with your group members and provide comments prior to the workshop.
If you do not provide a rough draft or fail to provide meaningful comments on your peers’ writing, your final grade for that paper will be reduced by a letter grade – that is, an A paper will become a B paper. On workshop days, you will discuss drafts and offer suggestions for how to improve those drafts; I will also provide specific criteria that you can use to evaluate each other’s work. You will also have the chance to ask me questions about the paper.
Understanding the choices that others make is not enough, however. Great writers are also aware of the choices they make, and to help you develop your awareness of the choices you make in your writing, you will write a short Post-Draft Assessment in class to accompany your rough draft. In this assessment, you will state your rhetorical purpose and detail how you attempted to accomplish that purpose in your writing. You will also call attention to the parts of your draft that you think succeeded and the parts that you think did not. (Each assessment will have more specific criteria, as we will discuss further in class.) By explaining your own purpose and methods, you will help guide your peers’ comments and may even come upon new strategies for approaching your argument. It will also help you better enter into the workshop conversation about your writing; it’s never good if your peers know more about your writing than you do.
You will also write a reflection on each assignment after you turn in your final draft. In this reflection, you will consider how your approach to the writing process and your understanding of yourself as a writer have changed as a result of the assignment you have just completed.
Writing is a public act as well as a private one, and peer editing is one important means by which we will integrate this social aspect into the classroom. You will receive a grade for your peer editing skills, which I will determine based on your engagement in workshops as well as on the quality of the written comments you provide on your peers’ drafts. I recognize that this sounds like a good deal of additional work, but remember that a good comment from a peer can substantially improve or unknot an ongoing challenge in your work. You owe it to yourselves and each other to be active and insightful workshop participants.