English 1100: Freshman Composition I

Tentative Syllabus for Fall 2007

Hal Snyder's Tentative Daily Syllabus

In addition, students will need something electronic (a floppy disc, a USB flash drive, etc.) large enough to hold the work for this class (if students are planning on using the Writing Center, something to save their work on).

Welcome to English 1100 Composition I. In this class, students will be introduced to the fundamentals of composition that will help them successfully complete their college education.  Readings and essay assignments are designed to introduce principles of expository writing and their application to various writing tasks. Emphasis is on methods of organization; techniques for developing unified, well-supported paragraphs and essays; grammatical conventions, proofreading and editing skills; and other important aspects of the writing process.

Good writers are aware of their own purposes for writing and the audiences they address.  They have reflected carefully on their own writing practices and processes, are aware of the conventions that guide them, and have learned strategies for inventing, organizing, drafting, and revising their writing.  They are fully aware of the choices open to them and how those choices affect and are affected by the readers they target.  Good writers also develop their skills through the practice of critical reading by paying careful attention to how other writers convey information and make arguments.  With this thesis in mind, this course is designed to help you discover, evaluate, and practice principles of effective writing.

Please notice that your fees for this semester include a Computer & Technology Fee, which entitles you to any empty seat at most of the computer labs located around campus. Although some labs are restricted (the BVTE Lab is reserved for BVTE students, the Writing Lab is reserved for freshman composition students, etc.), most students use the lab in Austin--visit http://www.ecu.edu/itcs/austinlab/alllabs.cfm for an up-to-date list of lab locations.

East Carolina University and the Americans with Disabilities Act

East Carolina University seeks to comply fully with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Students requesting accommodations based on a covered disability must go to the Department for Disability Support Services, Brewster A-114, to verify the disability before any accommodations can occur. The telephone number is 252-328-6799.

Format Standards

A professional appearance establishes any writer's credibility and improves reader understanding; thus, all written work submitted for evaluation should follow the criteria below:

• Use 20 lb., white, bond paper (or whatever paper is available for printers in the various campus writing labs).
• Maintain a 1-inch margin (top, bottom, left, and right margins).
• Compositions should use either an Arial or Times New Roman fonts.
• If you should discover one or two typing errors (typos), neatly correct the mistake(s) by crossing out the error(s)d writing the correction(s) above (three or more errors require both correction and reprinting).

Late Assignments

There aren't any, but if an assignment is submitted after a deadline has passed, 10 points per class meeting will be deducted from the grade awarded.

Online Matters

Students should visit http://personal.ecu.edu/snyderh/Messages/studinfo.html often, especially during inclimate weather.

Because material for this course often lends itself to being accomplished online, some of this course will involve the Distance Learning Model.

From time to time, some students encounter a printer problem. If you have a paper due and you develop a printer problem, e-mail yourself and attach the paper to your message. Go to the Writing Lab (Bate 2005), check your e-mail, open your attachment, and print it out on their printer.

Should you have occasion to contact me via e-mail, please identify yourself and the course section in the subject line (e.g., Assignment #1 Question John Doe 1100-008).

Submitting Assignments

Assignments are submitted in either of two ways:

• Turning it in at the end of the class when it is due, or
• Delivering to the instructor (or his office) by the end of the day the assignment is due; actually if it's in the box by my door by the beginning of the next class day, that'll be okay, too (but remember that I get here around 7:00 a.m.).

Some students may encounter a "printer" problem just before an assignment is due. If this should happen to you, send yourself an e-mail and attach the assignment. Go to the Writing Lab (Bate 2005), check your e-mail, open your attachment, and print it out on their printer--then you can submit your assignment(s) on a timely basis.

Do NOT e-mail me an assignment, unless you are instructed to. Under no circumstances will an assignment be accepted after it has been critiqued in class.

 

Table 1: Summary of Assignments & Percentage of Final Grade
Project #1 (Reflective Writing)	20%
Project #2 (Analytical Writing)	20%
Project #3 (Informative Writing)	20%
Project #4 (Evaluative Writing)	20%
Final Exam (Timed Writing)	10%
Studentship (service in draft sessions, participation, attendance, leadership)	10%
total	100%

  

Table 2: Grades and What They Mean
Letter Grade	What the Grade Means
A (100 - 90)	Very Good--A great pleasure to read, this writing excites the reader by how well it achieves the  purpose of the assignment.
B (89-80)	Good--Well worth reading, this writing makes it easy for the reader to gain new insights and knowledge and to respect your point of view.
C (79-70)	Fair--Not so good, but not too bad, the writing gives readers something for their efforts, but no very much.
D	(This grade is rarely given because what you turn in is either acceptable or unsatisfactory)
F (0)	Poor--Lacking significant thought and hard to understand, this writing is plagued by such things as inappropriate or inaccurate word choice, weird syntax, grammatical errors, misspellings, and punctuation errors. This leaves the reader wondering or regretting any effort at reading.

Because all students can expect to be treated equally, there are two other things:

• There is NO extra credit (this concept is unknown to those outside of high school).
• There's NO crying (this puts some of the fairer sex at a great advantage than whiney men).

Good writers are aware of their own purposes for writing and the audiences they address.  They have reflected carefully on their own writing practices and processes, are aware of the conventions that guide them, and have learned strategies for inventing, organizing, drafting, and revising their writing.  They are fully aware of the choices open to them and how those choices affect and are affected by the readers they target, their aims in producing documents, and the types of writing in which they are engaged. Good writers also develop their skills through the practice of critical reading. With this thesis in mind, we will discover, evaluate, and practice principles of effective academic writing and rhetoric.

Assignments are designed to help students understand the following:

• that writing is a process in which discovering a subject and revising it in several drafts are chief components

• that writers develop subjects in a variety of predictable methods

• that a writer's purpose and audience dictate the patterns that a writer chooses

• that most writing involves making decision/discoveries about questions, subjects, purposes, audience, and style

Project #1: Reflective Writing: Narrating Significance of Texts Around You (20%)

Literacy Narrative:  Writing for an audience of your 1100 classmates, you will describe and explain a significant event in your experiences with language (these experiences might include reading, writing, and/or speaking). Your purpose in telling your classmates about this event is to help them understand your current attitudes toward language (reading, writing, and/or speaking) and your current understanding of what the term “literacy” means.  In other words, your narrative should help your classmates see what “literacy” means to you (based on the events you describe) and should convey the personal significance of your past experience(s) with literacy. We will look at several sample literacy narratives in class to give you a better idea of the kinds of events you might describe and the strategies you might use to explain their significance. The event(s) you choose to write about may have had positive or negative effects, but in either case you must carefully describe the event(s) for your audience, keeping in mind that most of your classmates are not familiar with your family, cultural, or educational background. Use dialogue if/when appropriate.

Your narrative should be approximately 4 pages (+/- 1100 words).

Project #2: Analytical Writing: Understanding the Texts in Your Life  (20 %)

Rhetorical Analysis This assignment asks you to select a short text that has been circulated somewhere on the ECU campus (this might be an advertisement, a flyer, a letter to the editor of the newspaper, a course syllabus, etc.) and analyze how the writer(s) of the text uses rhetorical strategies.  The audience for your paper is other students in the class, and your purpose is to compose a clear, academic essay that teaches them how the text you’ve chosen uses the rhetorical strategies we discuss in class. Questions you will need to consider in your analysis include the following:

• Who is the intended audience for the text?
• What are the writer’s purposes in writing the text?
• What effects on the audience is the writer trying to produce?
• What rhetorical strategies does the writer use to produce these effects?
• More ?s

As part of your analysis, you must quote specific passages and examples from the text to support your claims about the writer’s use of rhetoric. Be sure to include a copy of the text (or a copy of the image) with your paper.

Your analysis should be approximately 4 pages (+/- 1100 words).

Project #3: Informative Writing: Explaining Your First Year at ECU (20%)

This assignment asks you to inform your readers about a culture to which you belong.  The culture you focus on may be a campus culture (a student organization, a class you are taking, an IM sports club, etc.); a community culture (a club or group you belong to in your hometown or the local area outside the university, the neighborhood in which you live, etc.); or a workplace culture (a place at which you hold a part or full time job).

Your assignment is to write an article—in the form and format of a feature news story with at least one visual—that explains the culture you have selected and that responds to preconceived notions your readers might have about that culture. Your article must include information based on an informal interview of at least one person who has been involved in the culture for more than a month. Your audience for this article should be one of the following (I will ask you to specify your choice shortly after we begin discussing the assignment in class):

• Your hometown newspaper (you’ll need to provide me a sample copy—online or hardcopy)

• The East Carolinian

• CNN.com

•  Another news source approved by me

The kind and amount of detail you must provide about the culture you choose will depend on the audience you select for your article. In addition, you will need to make yourself familiar with the writing conventions of the publication that you choose and follow those conventions in the text that you write.

Your article should be approximately 4 pages (+/- 1000 words—part of the 4 pages will be used by the visual you choose).

Project #4: Evaluative Writing: Assessing a Policy that Directly Affects You (20%)

Following the strategies discussed in the reading and in class, you will create a text in a format of your choosing that proposes ways to improve some aspect of campus culture. You will also select and address an appropriate audience for this proposal; in other words, you must identify and then persuade a specific individual (or group of individuals) that has the power to affect the improvements you propose. We will discuss selection of an appropriate audience and text format in class.

The primary aim of your proposal should be to suggest changes that will make campus cultures more beneficial and welcoming for students, but, in order for these proposals to be persuasive, you will need to explain briefly what is problematic about the way things are. We will talk about proposal writing in class.

A final requirement of this assignment is research.  You must locate and integrate into your text information from at least 3 written sources (articles, newspapers, credible websites, etc.).

Your persuasive text should be approximately 5 pages (+/- 1375 words).

Final Exam: Critical Response/Timed Essay Writing: Summarizing and Responding Critically (10%)

One of the most important skills an academic writer must possess is the ability to respond effectively to various texts.  For your final exam, you will be presented with a text to which you will respond analytically.  As university students, you will sometimes be called upon to write essays under time constraints:  to read quickly, to organize and outline your ideas, and to produce a reasonably detailed, lucid, and organized piece of critical writing. Your in-class final will ask you to compose a 3-5 page response to a text provided to you on the spot and with which you are probably unfamiliar. 

• convinces your reader that the subject is both controversial and significant
  
• establishes and justifies criteria for evaluating the subject, and
  
• explains how the subject does and/or does not meet those criteria. 
  

Attendance is required, as is promptness with all assignments

• Missed classes and late assignments will be penalized.
• All drafts submitted to the instructor must be printed out (i.e., not handwritten).
• Missing scheduled conferences with the instructor will be penalized.
• Students are expected to behave professionally (active participation in class activities and support for the work of others)

Although "life's little problems" often come up at the darnednest times, students are expected to be in class on time, every time, for all the time allotted to this course because it is in the classroom that information essential for the successful completion of this course is presented. However, if circumstances require your presence elsewhere, you are still responsible for material presented in class. If you anticipate any absences, please see me before hand.

Students will be rewarded for their studentship, which includes appropriate attendance, meeting for conferences, and active participation.

Participation

Class participation is an important element of the learning process, and students are expected to feel free to freely and openly discuss the subject at hand. Since participation demonstrates (at least in part) your preparedness for each class, you are expected to:

• Participate in class discussions and honor the Honor Code (read: Don't Plagiarize!). 
• Be honest--don't try to B. S. me!

In the past, I have encouraged students to review their assignments as they prepare for future assignments. In order to do this, students necessarily have to have each assignment returned to them. Some students have allowed their friends (fellow members of clubs, fraternities, or sororities, not to mention those they are dating or their best bud) to make photocopies of their assignments (or worse yet) place their original, corrected copy in club/fraternity/sorority file.

Know this: such action violates the university's Honor Code and does a disservice to students who "copy the 'right' solution" from past assignments. Although former students have thought they'd help their friends, they have really harmed them (by robbing students of the opportunity to learn from their mistakes). The "real world" doesn't follow this unethical practice, and if I find that any of my students (either present or former) participate in this form of plagiarism (by either copying a completed assignment of a former students or by providing an assignment for you to copy), both students will be prosecuted to the fullest of my ability. This is not a warning; it's a promise.

Furthermore, the ECU Student Handbook defines plagiarism as "Copying the language, structure, ideas, and/or thoughts of another and adopting some as one's own original work." Be aware that the writing you do in this course must be your own work and, primarily, your own words. It is okay to incorporate the words of others from articles, essays, and interviews as evidence to support your ideas, but when you do this, you should be sure to cite your sources appropriately. We will talk about documentation and citations during this course. Penalties for plagiarism are severe--the can include failing this course, suspension, or even expulsion from the university, so be sure to see me about any doubts you may have before you turn in an assignment. You can access the student handbook at http://www.ecu.edu/studenthandbook/III.htm.

Workshops

Part of the writing process is revision, and for most of our writing projects, we will have a writing workshop (or peer review); it makes sense that if you are to obtain "feedback" from your peers, you must first have a good first/rough draft. Thus, if you have no draft, don't waste the valuable time of classmates by coming to class!

• practice strategies for discovering topics and developing them into well-constructed essays

• develop various techniques of drafting and revising

• increase your awareness of  organizational strategies and your ability to apply them constructing effective essays
• compose essays with effective beginnings, middles, and ends (introductions, unified paragraphs in the body, conclusions/summaries)
• adapt your writing to intended audiences and become aware of how audience and purpose affect content, tone, syntax, and structure
• become attentive to how audience and purpose affect content, tone, syntax, and structure


• learn how to support generalizations with sufficient and appropriate details
  
• practice writing with precision and clarity and with effective syntax, punctuation, and spelling
  
• explore writing to narrate, analyze, evaluate, and persuade
  
• gain competence in using computer technology in the writing process
  
• practice reading and thinking critically
• practice scheduling and meeting deadlines
• elevate their writing level from high school to college level
  

Furthermore, students will write extensively, both formally and informally, often for every class meeting. You should be prepared to share your writing with your classmates and instructor on a regular basis. You will complete a minimum of 20 pages of polished prose.

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Created May 1, 1997  Updated Nov. 29, 2007