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College Writing II ENG 110 - Medaille College - Spring 2010 other pages The Course | The Syllabus | The Essay | The Case | The Reports Printer-friendly version of the Course Syllabus

Welcome!

Why this writing course?

How does this course fit into the rest of the curriculum and your career?

Four or five years from now, if you get a job because of your college degree, that doesn't mean you'll be able to keep that job. The job you get will probably be with an organization. You'll always have a boss, of course, and you yourself may be other people's boss. Since you don't want the kind of job where you make things, the factory jobs that many people go to college in order to avoid, then you'll have the kind of job where you manipulate information about the things that other people make, often in a different country. You'll have what's known as a desk job. We used to call those folks paper pushers, but now it's more accurate to say computer file managers. What will you do at that desk, in front of that computer?

You'll read and write. You'll be expected to think clearly about the reading and writing so that you can help manage change in your organization. In a large organization, you'll be a small cog in a large machine. But even if you are self-employed or if you are a small-businessperson with only a couple of employees, then you wear all the hats and are responsible for -- and accountable for -- managing all the change in your small organization.

Are you ready?

In many ways, yes, you are ready. In other ways, you aren't. Those large organizations want to see whether you can graduate from college, which will mean that you're probably reasonably good at doing what bosses (teachers) ask you to do, no matter how nonsensical it may seem. In other words, you know how to "get with the program".

The other thing those organizations want you to be able to do is to think and communicate clearly. It doesn't matter whether you know much about the industry because they can always train you and it's always changing anyway. In other words, your courses in sport management or criminal justice or education will help you get your first job in one of those industries. But this writing course and your other liberal arts courses will help you keep that job in order to get enough experience to get your next job in that field.

Note that for the second job, your major matters far less than your experience. If you have several years of successful experience in an organization or an industry, it doesn't matter what your major was. In fact, many companies try to avoid stale thinking and stimulate creative thinking by hiring people with a variety of college majors.

Let me switch analogies to sports.

If the communicating (thinking, reading, listening, writing, speaking) that you'll do in twenty years is like playing the sport professionally, then the writing that you do for courses in your major in your senior year is like the pre-season. The writing that you do in other writing courses is like a scrimmage. Then do you know what this course is?

It's calesthenics and fundamentals, it's breaking the sport down and practicing all the parts by isolating them and repeating them. Let's look at this course, College Writing, and the course for which it is a prerequisite: ENG 200 Analytical Writing.

In College Writing, you focus on paragraphs as building blocks of essays. In Analytical writing, you focus on essays as building blocks of organizational reports.

To use a basketball analogy, College Writing breaks the game into its components: we'll focus on rebounding. Then we'll focus on foul shots. Then passing. Analytical Writing is more like a scrimmage, where you're putting the components together into practice games.

To continue the analogy, the games that count are the other courses you take. When those teachers ask you too write about their subjects, here's the question:

Can you learn what you used in practice (the writing courses) to put together and execute an effective game plan, an essay or research report, in other courses?

Why is this course imporant?

This course is designed into increase the control you have over paragraphs and sequences of paragraphs. Your actual thoughts are chaotic. When you read back what you wrote, you'll be able to see your ideas articulated and organized. You revise your writing in order to articulate and organize more effectively for your audience and their purpose.

You can't do that without the research and thinking that go along with writing, so you're going to do some research, too.

In many areas of life, writing can be a form of self-expression or self-revelation. However, an organization isn't going to hire you to do that kind of writing. The organization hires your professional self, not your personal self. (In that sense, how many selfs do you have?) The writing that you are most likely to get paid for in a job is not necessarily writing that you want to do. It's not necessarily about topics that you feel strongly about. No one cares about your "personal opinion" of the topic. What your writing advocates, you may not agree with at all. In any case, you may well be writing with a team of other employees, and your words will get melded with theirs.

But you're still going to have to write. The alternative is no job.

That sounds pretty bleak. Let's look at it from the other direction. Strong communication skills will help your career. They lead to raises and promotions and new, better jobs. Why?

In most organizations, you're more likely to write reports than essays. However, what you do in an essay in college is what you'll do when you sit with two or three of the employees you supervise and persuade them to buy into your bosses' bosses' strategy or plan, which you may or may not personally agree with. What distinguishes an essay from a report is what you'll do when you show your employees how to think about what they're going to do next.

As this example shows, much of the "leadership" in organizations involves the boss getting the employees to buy into a strategy or plan. This happens for the organization as a whole, but it also happens at every level in the chain of command, somewhere in which you will be expected to exert these "leadership" skills.

I will go so far as to say that to produce the kind of thinking and interpersonal communication you need to succeed in your career, the writing courses are the most important ones you will take at Medaille in terms of the opportunity to further develop skills that will serve you well throughout your career.

How many jobs do I expect you to have in your career? Dozens. And that's a good thing. At any given time in your career, what the company you happen to be working for makes or does is like what your essays are about. What you take with you from job to job and keep developing is like the essay-writing process itself.

You are going to have so many jobs that in addition to learning how to communicate well, the next best thing you can do during the next four years to make yourself employable both short and long term is to spend a semester (or year or even summer) living and studying in a foreign country. Five years ago when the College searched for a new president, "internationalizing the campus" was listed among the "challenges and opportunities ahead".

Because we're all in this together for the next three months, it makes a lot of sense to have you all research and write about the same general topic, something broad enough that you can all find your individual path within it. On the other hand, you all have different interests, and you probably write more effectively about a topic you're at least interested in. So ....

Learn more on the case page.

Information is ...

This course is about searching for information, organizing it, and then packaging it for readers.

It's also about getting you to think differently about information. An article by John Perry Barlow (below) in Wired magazine a decade ago started me thinking differently. The article, titled "The Economy of Ideas", explores three statements:

Information is an activity.
Information is a life form.
Information is a relationship.

In one memorable line, Barlow writes:

Information is the pitch, not the baseball, the dance, not the dancer.

In this course, you're going to find more dance partners than you know what to do with.

The Bigger Picture

What you're learning in this course is the basic unit of discourse in our society: claim, evidence, and explanation. Only the the last several hundred years have humans been able to agree on this unit of discourse, and even now, only some of us do it some of the time. However, there is no doubt that doing it well results in larger paychecks, although it is certainly true that not all large paychecks come from using this unit of discourse.

What is a unit of discourse?

I use that phrase to identify a group of sentences, sometimes a group of paragraphs, that meet the requirements of evidential reasoning that we have developed in the last couple of centuries.

What is evidential reasoning

It's a fancy phrase for something you've been doing all your life. Let's distinguish it from something similar, narrative reasoning, that it is often confused with.

Walter Fisher's Narrative Paradigm

Which world sounds more like the one you live in?

The narrative world, if it's at all like the world I live in.

In this course, I am asking you to work the left side of your brain, the rational empirical side. The research and thinking and their expression in a paragraph or a sequence of paragraphs is what I am calling the basic "unit of discourse."

Learn more.

Many marketing research reports for Fortune 500 companies are structured as sequences of this unit of discourse. Many PhD dissertations are structured this way, too. The pattern can get layered and nested in complex ways. The parts can have other names. But the basic unit of discourse is the same.

It's the same pattern you use in your everyday life to decide what movie to go to with your friends or to decide your major in college.

I predict that you will spend much of your professional life solving problems and making decisions. You will be doing it in the context of an organization, and this unit of discourse will be with you for the rest of your life.

The Course Web

The Course

What's old: ENG 110 is a writing course, so you will write a lot. What's new: ENG 110 will be as paperless as possible.

Find out all the official stuff. How is this course described in the college catalog? What are you going to know more about and know how to do better? What's the self-assessment all about?

The Syllabus

This is the page to bookmark. It will change often and be the place to learn what we're going to do in class and what you should do before class.

The Case

In this course, you'll learn by doing, by researching and thinking and writing. Learn more about the learning community and what you're going to write as well as the constraints and expectations.

The Essay

The parts and functions of the stardard research essay, of the kind we are asking you to write for this course and that you will be asked to write for other courses.

The Reports

The oral presentations and the accompanying visual aids. What are the other students doing? When is yours scheduled? How will they be evaluated?

Printer-friendly version of the Course Disclosure Statement

modified: January 15, 2010
by: Doug Anderson
url: http://toLearn.net/eng110/index.html