Syllabus: ENG 110 College Writing II: Spring 2010

The links on this syllabus will take you on divergent paths. I don't expect any of you to read -- or to need -- all of it. However, if you're going to progress towards the course objectives, I do expect all of you to read -- and to need -- much of it. It's up to you to balance your learning style against these resources.

Schedule at a Glance

	in class	assignments due via email
January
19, 21	intro evaluation rubric research areas brainstorming	possible research topics before class on January 21 writing sample January 21
26, 28	audience and purpose unit of discourse rhetorical modes locate and evaluate sources	research topics proposed January 26 your research topic approved January 28
February
2, 4	evaluation rubric, topic to thesis statement, MLA citations format essay 1 definition	possible essay 1 thesis statements due February 2 essay 1 thesis statement approved February 4
9, 11	skepticism, plagiarism, introductions and conclusions, paragraphing, writing process writing assignments in other courses essay 1 thesis statements essay 2 compare and contrast
16, 18	essay 1 workshop	essay 1 first draft due February 16 MLA-documented works cited (first 10 sources) due February 18 essay 1 draft returned February 18 possible essay 2 thesis statements due February 18 essay 2 thesis statement approved February 19
23, 25	essay 2 thesis statements essay 1 workshop	essay 1 final draft due February 25
March
2, 4	essay 2 workshop essay 3 thesis statements	essay 2 first draft due March 2 essay 2 first draft returned March 4 possible essay 3 thesis statements due March 4 essay 3 thesis statements approved March 5
16, 18	essay 2 workshop	essay 2 due March 16 essay 3 draft due March 18 essay 3 draft returned March 23
23, 25, 30	essay 3 workshop essay 4 thesis statements	essay 4 thesis statements due March 23 essay 4 thesis statement approved March 25 MLA-documented works cited (all min. 20 sources) due March 25 essay 3 due March 30
April
6, 8	essay 3 workshop	essay 4 draft due April 8
13, 15	essay 4 workshop	essay 4 draft returned April 13 MLA-documented works cited page due April 15 oral presentation materials (words and images) due April 15
20, 22	essay 4 workshop oral presentations: what did you learn about your topic?	essay 4 due April 20
27, 29	oral presentations, con'd. course wrap-up: what did you learn about writing?
May 3	(no class)	last day for handing in essays for ENG 110, May 3 your self-assessment due May 3

Day-by-Day

Personally, I am always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.
-- Winston Churchill

January 19, 21

introduction

course web at toLearn.net/eng110/ - welcome < index.html >, course < course.htm >, case < case.htm >, essay < essay.htm >, syllabus (this page) < syllabus.htm >, and reports < reports.htm >

title description background audience purpose foreground audience purpose analytical framework

to do

Just before class, I sent an email to your official college address from the email address I use for this course: eng110s10 at gmail.com. Reply to my email from your official college address or from another address if you prefer. For the assignments below, you can send me two emails or combine them into one. These are official course assignments and not doing them before class on Thursday, January 21, will get you a late mark on the reports page under your initials.

Send me an email at eng110s10 at gmail.com with half a dozen possible research topics or rhetorical situations.

Send me an email at eng110s10 at gmail.com with a sample of your writing, preferably, the best piece of writing you did for another writing course, perhaps ENG 100 or ENG 110. If you don't have any essays, send me something that's as close to an essay as you can get.

January 26, 28

title, description, background audience, purpose, foreground audience, purpose, analytical framework

In your GEN 110 course, you discussed or are discussing ideas that relate directly to this course:

Open-minded and reflective inquiry, substantial understanding, and informed judgment.

Who is your foreground audience? What questions do they have about your topic? What questions would they have if they knew more about the topic?

Essay 1 --

Your first essay is due on February 16. In it, you will define and characterize the situation you are writing about. The word "situation" is vague because your topics are so diverse.

Example

First support / topic sentence: Compared to other countries, even in the European Union, the Dutch are wealthy and healthy.

Second support / topic sentence: Most Dutch people speak at least one other language, English. Many speak it very well. And many know additional languages, especially French and German, the two large countries that border the Netherlands.

Thesis: Haitian adoptions should be expedited by the U.S. departments State and Homeland Security.

I recommend that you not write the essay with your email software. Write it off-line using a text editor or word processor. Save it. Then copy and paste it into the email. Don't attach it. That way, if anything goes wrong, you'll still have the saved copy.

You will be able to edit your short essay as often as you wish to, so the important thing is to get a draft for everyone to see ASAP.

Where will you get this information?

How will you document it?

Expectations of Professionals

What will you reasonably be expected to know the first day on your first job with your new college degree? You will surely go to meetings, talk on the phone, go to the library (yes, companies have libraries, too), and read and write documents. To what extent will you do that online? How web-centric (or wireless or paperless) will the organization be? Will you be expected to be a change agent?

hardware | What will you have on your desk, in your briefcase, in your pocket?

software skills | You don't have enough lifetimes to learn to use every feature of every piece of software that's on your computer right now.

knowledge | Will they describe you as having a lot of background knowledge or having a lot to learn? Will they describe you as full of theory but clueless about how organizations work?

On this course web's case page, you'll find some job ads from Monster.com. Look at how they don't seem to care what your major was as much as they care about the "liberal arts" that you want to get behind you: communications skills and general knowledge.

Most companies will say about your college major and your relative lack of experience, "Give me someone who can learn and communicate, and we'll teach them the rest."

The Bigger Picture

What you're learning in this course is the basic unit of discourse in our society. 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.

A discourse is considered to be an institutionalized way of thinking, a social boundary defining what can be said about a specific topic, or ... "the limits of acceptable speech" - or possible truth. Discourses are seen to affect our views on all things; it is not possible to escape discourse. For example, two notably distinct discourses can be used about various guerrilla movements describing them either as "freedom fighters" or "terrorists". In other words, the chosen discourse delivers the vocabulary, expressions and perhaps also the style needed to communicate. Discourse is closely linked to different theories of power and state, at least as long as defining discourses is seen to mean defining reality itself.

In ENG 110, you are going to practice the discourse of organizations, the means of access to power, how we get those in authority to pay attention to use. AKA The Rules of the Road

For ENG 110, a unit of discourse is 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

	the rational world	the narrative world
We are essentially ...	rational thinkers	storytellers
We make decisions on the basis of ...	logical arguments drawn from empirical evidence	"good" reasons, including history, culture, and perceptions about the status and character of the other people involved, however subjective and incompletely understood
Rationality is determined by ...	how much evidence we have and how well we argue	the probability, coherence and fidelity of our "good reason" stories
The world is a set of ...	logical puzzles that we can solve through rational analysis	stories from which we choose, and thus constantly re-create, our lives
	your other writing courses and most other college courses	your personal life; this course

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."

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.

what's an essay?

assignments

title description background audience purpose foreground audience purpose analytical framework

February 2, 4

February 9, 11

- Using the College-wide evaluation rubric, evaluate your final longer essay
- Overall, what did you learn in ENG 110 this semester?
- How did you learn it?

ENG 200 requirements

All of you must take at least one more writing course to graduate from Medaille. Many of you will take two or three more. In addition, other courses will require writing of various forms and lengths. Finally, your Gen Ed capstone courses GEN 410 and 411 will require a substantial piece of writing, probably the longest and most complex of your whole academic career.

The next writing course in the sequence is ENG 200 Analytical Writing. One of the things implied when you pass ENG 110 is that you are ready for ENG 200. While there is some variation among teachers, we all require a similar amount of writing and the same kind of writing -- analytical. We differ mostly on what you write about.

the collected writing you did for this course with special emphasis on the drafts you analyzed for your assessment essay

modified: January 27, 2010
by Douglas Anderson
http://toLearn.net/eng110/syllabus.htm

The Syllabus

ENG 110 - College Writing II - Spring 2010