Sample Syllabi for Writing Program Courses
Note that all syllabi are the copyrighted property of their authors, and are provided here for guidance to new Goucher students, and for new instructors in the Goucher College Writing Program. They describe courses previously taught, and therefore they may not predict the way the same instructor will teach a future section of the same course. Some instructors also are not currently scheduled to teach the course, so make sure you have consulted SAS's Course Offering booklet for the semester. If the course/instructor does not have a short description beside the hyperlink, click on the hyperlink to go directly to the course syllabus.
English 103.01 (Bess):
English 104 (Britt): English 104 is the first of two writing courses. In this course, you will learn a writing process that will enable you to develop a topic, organize your ideas, write a draft, revise, edit and proofread. You will learn to conduct basic research using both print and electronic sources. You can expect to write frequently and apply the skills you learn to other courses and then in your career. The course includes a review of grammar, mechanics and usage.
English 104 (Brunyate): Despite arbitrarily imposed deadlines by professors, writing is rarely a destination. It is always a journey. English 104 asks that you learn to examine--and, if possible, to revel in--your choices as a writer, but in the academic context. In our class, reading and class discussion will provide a sort of cerebral mulch out of which your papers will grow and take shape. The writing process will involve two stages: first, connecting to and analyzing various texts (nonfiction, fiction, and poetry) through informal exploratory papers; and second, creating your own original discussion about some of those texts. More than a writing course, ours will also be a thinking course—and one that experiences the strengths of community, as together we explore ideas and how they are conveyed.
English 104 (Sanders): "Hard Choices, High Costs, Great Rewards"--Academic reading and writing strategies will be used to analyze, understand, and develop persuasive theses about events reported in newspaper and magazine articles. Past topics have included the use of anencephalic babies as organ donors, the competing claims of self-defense against the right to fair trial in self-defense shootings, the division of responsibility for medical care following an abortion, and the calculation of U.S. News & World Report college rankings. Future cases will continue to respond to current events and to enduring issues, but in each instance students will be responsible for deciding how the facts should be determined, what kinds of people constitute the interested parties, what interests and values each major party brings to the case, and what position each student believes needs written support. Some problem-solving research will be required. Click here for a course web site.
English 105 (Meisner--Fall Advanced Placement): In this course you will learn to write college-level, research-based papers. In exploring the course's theme, Reading/Seeing the World, we will examine a diverse array of mediums, from essays and short stories to cartoons, films and advertisements. You will practice analyzing, or "unpacking", what's communicated out in our world and generating an informed response to it. The course is divided into three units: Seeing the Media, Seeing Identity, and, finally, Seeing History/Creating a Future. "Seeing": identifying for yourself a shaky truth from many, possibly conflicting and/or persuasive, interpretations--- even "seeing" more distinctly what is in, and needs to be in, your own writing.
English 105 (Robinson--Fall Advanced Placement): This course on academic writing with a focus on research will focus on identity: national, racial and ethnic. In addition to outside texts, students’ writings in the form of published class anthologies will facilitate our discussions of composition and research. We will begin our inspection of identity by examining national identity with Warren Leight’s drama, No Foreigners Beyond this Point. Next, our discussion of identity will proceed to an analysis of racial identity with essays from Patricia J. Williams’ Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race (1997). Finally, the dynamics of ethnic identity will be explored with Gish Jen’s novel, Mona in the Promised Land (1996). In addition to an analytical and responsive essay on the novel, students will have the opportunity to research an aspect of race and ethnicity. The topic of a second documented essay will be decided on in consultation with the instructor.
English 105 (Sanders): This course teaches students about intellectual property, specifically written forms of original expert "IP" which they will learn to produce and to relate to the original expert IP of other authors. Our goal is to transform research from something done in response to a teacher's command into something writers do to pursue their own curiosities and to establish their own expertise in writing. The paper topics move from commercial sources of expert opinion to scholarship on literature and film, ending with a freely chosen topic in any academic discipline one can major in at Goucher College.
English 201 (Bess): An intermediate course designed to help students polish their prose and/or achieve College Writing Proficiency, with a concentration on the function of higher education in American society, and its potential as a tool students can use to take charge of their destinies.
English 201 (Gould): An intermediate writing course designed to help students polish their prose and/or achieve College Writing Proficiency, with a concentration on professional writing linked to students' declared or probable majors, using resources in major departments and in the library's Internet and print resources.
English 201 (Pippen): An intermediate writing course designed to help students polish their prose and/or achieve College Writing Proficiency, with a concentration on literary scholarship using primary and secondary sources from the library's Jane Austen collection as well as Internet and print sources.
English 208 Journalism Workshop (Decker): An introduction to news gathering, news and feature writing, journalism's function in American and world society, and journalistic ethics.
English 219 Linguistics (Garrett):
Frontiers 100 (Bardaglio): Peter Bardaglio's section of Frontiers, the freshman core course, has an ingenious combination subject matter that appeals to freshman interests and assignments that galvanize them into productive writing and analytical thinking very early in their first semester. Its assignment sequencing and topic development strategies would be useful to instructors planning freshman-year courses. If you are using a dial-in modem connection, you may find the students' PowerPoint presentations too large for reasonable downloading, but otherwise they pose an interesting challenge to the academic paper as a means of communicating the results of students' research writing.