English 104.22: Academic Writing I
Professor Arnie Sanders, Fall 2007 VM G57 (x6515) Office Hours: Mon. and Wed., 3:30-4:20 and by appointment. Home page last revised: 11/30/2007 02:27:24 PM
New!: 11/28/07-- For Friday's class, remember to bring your Barber essay! For next Monday, bring the paper you want to revise for the final portfolio and prepare to give endnote-worthy advice to your workshop partner. Click here for the final portfolio revision evaluation criteria.
Friday conference schedule. Remember, just showing up is not attendance at the Friday conferences. Your paper has to show up, too!
H. P. Grice's "Maxims" for ordinary language communication--four rules to make your prose communicate effectively.
alphaDictioanry.com--an alphabetized list of words every college senior should know how to use and understand, with etymologies (where it came from--essential to use) and cautions about similar but different words with which they can be confused, important for the learner. To write better, you need better and more words.
The World Wide Words site--another vocabulary development site, less well-organized than alphaDictionary but with more obscure and rare words.
Are you sure you can tell the difference between accurate, legal paraphrase and an illegal paraphrase which might be considered plagiarism? Many undergraduates willingly admit they are unsure about the rules for paraphrase, and others think they are safe but are not. The "Paraphrase-Plagiarism Risk Quiz" gives you a chance to find out, anonymously, how well you can tell the difference between illegal and legal paraphrase of source passages. Choose among passages from Literary Criticism, Science (Biology), Social Science (Anthropology), Economics, and History. Taking this quiz may save you enormous trouble with the Academic Honor Board, or it may confirm your belief that you can paraphrase competently. Please try it. For my English 105 students, it is required. Please send comments and questions to asanders@goucher.edu and be sure to specify which passages you were working with.
For the Writing Program web site, click here. For the Writing Center web site, click here. To make an appointment, call 410-337-6551. Click here for the current Writing Center schedule and tutors' names. To preserve their privacy, we do not publish their phone numbers, but Goucher students can look them up in the campus phone book or by using CampusWeb.
Course Description
This course will teach you to write papers based on college-level analytical insights that mean something important to you. Our goal is to enable you to communicate those insights to your readers so that they will be persuaded to see the situation from your perspective. Ordinarily, this course will help students meet the non-research criteria for College Writing Proficiency, but if you also can learn to use relevant scholarly sources to support your thesis, you also may be able to meet all the CWP criteria by submitting a portfolio of three papers to the Writing Program in December. I am willing to give willing students additional instruction to help them accomplish this goal, but our primary course objective remains to develop mature analytical writing skills. Analysis is an important type of mental behavior that produces many types of writing you already can do, and it leads logically to more difficult types of writing. You might think of it as something you might do in five stages, each of which drills down more deeply into what we can know of what we're analyzing. Your composing process will have to become more flexible and will take longer to develop final drafts. Nevertheless, what you eventually write in those final drafts will become increasingly mature, scholarly, and uniquely your own intellectual property. The final stages in the development of your writing process will occur in English 105 and in writing for your major, but English 104 will ask you to take some big steps toward those goals. If you are not sure this course is right for you, click here to learn what steps you can undertake to find out, and to learn something about how I will teach the course.
Texts: Like any professional writer, you will need a writer’s handbook to help you remember solutions to grammar problems and document format rules. I have ordered a handbook at the bookstore, but if you have one that was published within the last two or three years, it will do the job. You also should consult this course web site at least once before each scheduled class meeting. I will use this site to help you develop your papers, and it contains useful links to sites generally useful for Goucher College writers. All other readings will be provided in photocopied or web-based documents, though you also may want to introduce the products of your own research.
Case Study Papers: The course will unfold in a series of four "Cases" based on events which pose serious problems for our culture, problems which will require us to make hard choices. In every case, "not making a choice" will constitute just another choice--"doing nothing" is always "doing something" when you are dealing with dynamic complex systems. Successful papers usually will engage some limited aspect of the case as a problem to be solved, and will help readers make some progress toward a solution, even if the solution, itself, is unattainable. What we cannot solve, we must improve, if only be understanding it better. Cases will unfold over two weeks during which, on Mondays and Wednesdays, we will analyze the cases and plan possible papers responding to them. The first Friday class of every case week will be cancelled so that I can meet with each of you, one-on-one, to discuss your rough draft responding to that case, which will be due in the conference. Graded revisions of those drafts will be due in the following "Process Writing Friday" class.
"Process Writing Fridays": On the Fridays of weeks 1, 3, 5, 9, and 12, when the revised drafts are due for your case study papers and the research project (see below), you will have no additional tasks to prepare for class. Concentrate on making your papers as good as they can be in the time available. On these five "Process Writing Fridays," I will be responsible for introducing you to some writing process strategies that will help you improve your performance of its important repeated sub-skills, like brainstorming, sentence casting, paragraph reorganization, and coherence editing. Some of you may have heard of, or even used these process writing techniques before, but I can guarantee you were not told everything you need to know about why they work, and how to use them more effectively. By the end of the semester, you will have some new writing strategies that will help you make the best use of the skills and knowledge you have acquired.
"Working Holidays" To give you a break between weeks in which drafts of papers are due, there will be no full-length papers due in weeks 6-7, 10, and 13-14. During these three "Working Holidays," we will spend class discussing research methods of professional scholars, formal logic and logical fallacies, and how to prepare for and write the in-class essay exam. Each project will produce a short written document that will count for 1/24th of your grade--not enough for any one of them to damage your final grade, but enough to hold your attention. They will help you rethink the basic thought processes and social expectations which are fundamental to academic writing at the college level. We probably will have to "un-teach" some of what you learned in high school if your teachers did not expect that you would study at a school with Goucher's standards. This is your chance to rethink what thinking is, how we can claim to know the truth, and how our knowledge gets measured and appreciated.
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