POLICIES ENGL102 Writing Rhetorically with Sources
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LEE TORDA, PhD 310 Tillinghast Hall Bridgewater State University 508.531.2436 [email protected] [email protected] www.leetorda.com |
Spring 2022 Office Hours for Students
NOTE: All office hours for students will be held on Zoom until further notice. Attend Any Zoom Office hours by clicking on this link. M&W 12:30-1:30 T 4:00-5:00 and by appointment Schedule a time to meet with me, during office hours or otherwise, by clicking on this link. |
Course Description
Students in this course will develop knowledge of persuasive writing and rhetoric, learning and practicing various approaches to conducting research and to integrating the ideas of others into one’s own text. Emphasis is on writing longer and substantive texts that incorporate a variety of sources.
This course will give you intense practice in writing, reading and research in English, primarily for academic purposes. The thematic focus of our course will be a topic that should be of interest to you: attending university in the United States. What it means to attend college in the United States means different things to different people. For US citizens attending US colleges and universities, they must weigh the cost of attending university with the benefits of a college degree. A college degree seems to be required for more and more jobs, and yet a college degree is no guarantee of getting a job you want or a job that pays you enough to pay back college debt. And what about attending the right school? What even makes a school the right school?
While these are not the same questions that an international student who chooses to study abroad will ask, international students also have to answer questions for themselves. For instance, what is the value of studying abroad? How is study abroad viewed in your home country? Are there downsides to choosing to study abroad or earn a degree from a US school?
The question here is not simply, “compare the advantages and disadvantages of studying abroad”. Of course, you will start with a question like that, but the work we will do together will rely on formal and informal research to explore just how complex these questions are for us. In fact, I hope that you will show the complexities of studying abroad from a range of perspectives: for yourself, your family, and for the various communities you might be a part of.
These kinds of questions will be the focus of our research and writing in these four weeks. You will explore various research techniques including locating and evaluating source material, conducting interviews and surveys, and ethnographic research. You will write and respond to a variety of readings and you will write about your own research into the questions you are interested in asking. Finally, you will put together your materials in a final report, accompanied by a presentation that you will share with your classmates. You will get extensive practice in producing, collaborating, and revising writing that is appropriate for the university classroom.
While this course will be asynchronous, you will have the opportunity to work with each other and with me as we read, write, research these important topics together. It will be a challenging but exciting four weeks. Welcome!
Learning Objectives/Course Outcomes
In this course, students will
Selections from They Say/I Say by Graff & Birkenstein, The New York Times, and other supplementary readings. All required texts will be provided to you electronically in a “TEXTS” folder in our class Blackboard site
Policies & Requirements
Attendance: This is an asynchronous course. Students will complete the work according to the schedule outlined in the syllabus. In order to successfully participate in class, students must post work to our class discussion board and/or submit writing for review by me or their peers by the deadlines outlined on our class syllabus. Students should expect that they will need to post between two and three times a week, depending on what other work is due that week. Students should expect to submit writing towards their final research project each of the four weeks.
Writing Conferences: Each week, Monday-Thursday, I set aside time to meet with students. There will be enough time slots each week for every student enrolled in the class to meet with me once a week to talk about their work, get feedback, support, and guidance. You should plan to meet with me at least two times during the four weeks the of our course. You can meet with me every week if you want to. Meetings are 20 minutes long. You should bring something you want to work on to each meeting. Meetings with me are part of how you earn your Informal writing/Discussion Board Post grade in this class. Failure to meet with me at least twice will negatively affect the 20% of your final grade you earn with the informal writing/discussion board post. NOTE: I’ve tried to identify a time that makes it convenient for you and for me to meet together online; however, if this time does not work out for you, email me and we can arrange a better time that works for you.
Informal writing/CLASS DISCUSSION BOARDPosts: Two to three times a week, students will be required to post 300 words to questions or discussions on our Class Discussion Board. You will have to post and respond to your classmates’ posts. You will also be a Respondent to the Discussion Board for the whole class. Discussion Board posts and responses count for 20% of your final grade in this class. Complete directions for the Discussion Board assignment will be available on our classroom site, including detailed information about how you will be evaluated.
Formal Writing/Research project: Each week, you will be responsible for drafting a part of your research final project. You will submit drafts in blackboard, get feedback from me and from your classmates, and complete a revision plan for each draft you submit. In the final week of the course, you will assemble the various parts of your research project and put it together in a final research report. There are four parts to your research projects (the percentages in the parenthesis shows the value of each assignment toward your final grade):
Week One: Positioning yourself as a researcher/formulating your question (10%)
Week Two: Answering your question part one: locating and evaluating online sources, summarizing, paraphrasing, quoting. (10%)
Week Three: Answering your question part two: conducting interviews and preparing your data, comparing and contrasting, ethical considerations in research. (10%)
Week Four: Reformulating your questions/Answering your question: Bringing together all the parts of your draft into a final product. (20%)
Researcher’s Notebook & Final Report/Presentation. At the end of the course, you will submit a portfolio that includes all the drafting work you’ve done on your research project. You will include drafts, revisions, reflections on your progress that you will be asked to submit every week as part of each of the four parts of the research project. In the researcher’s notebook, you will include a final reflection letter that asks you to reflect on what you’ve learned about reading, writing, and research in our class. Finally, you will create a 5-minute recorded Pecha Kucha— a recorded version of your research project using a voiceover and visuals that the rest of the class will watch and respond to. The Researcher’s Notebook & Final Presentation is worth 20% of your final grade.
Practice in Academic Writing Exercises. Each week, we will focus on some aspect of writing academic papers. These topics will include appropriate citation practices, grammar and punctuation practice, bibliography, and language specific to research and academic writing, etc. Each week you’ll have something to read or watch; you’ll practice your skills individually and in small groups; you’ll put what you’ve learned into your formal writing for that week. As part of that, you’ll reflect on how learning a particular skill affected your writing and research that week. You will earn your grade for this project based on effort rather than on mastery. Practice in Academic Writing Exercises will make up 10% of your final grade.
Evaluation
Information for the requirements for earning the “A”, “B,” and “C” grade are outlined for each assignment on the assignment page, all of which are located in the “assignments” folder on the Blackboard site for our course. If you do not complete the work required for one of those three grades, you will fail the course. There is no “D” grade. How much each assignment is worth towards your total grade is explained above and repeated here (as well as on each assignment page):
Discussion Board Posts, Responses, and summary 20%
Positioning yourself as a Researcher/Formulating
Your Question (750 words) 10%
Locating & Evaluating Sources Part I (750-1000 words) 10%
Locating & Evaluating Sources Part II (1000 words) 10%
The Research Notebook /Research Presentation
And Final Research Report (2500-3000 words) 20%
Practice in Academic Writing Exercises 10%
The way you will earn your grade in this class will be based on completing the list of tasks required of each task, your effort to include what you learn in our class in your own writing, and your thoughtful reflection on your learning and your revision each week and in your final researcher’s notebook.
Plagiarism: One of the conventions of writing in the US university that we will discuss is what plagiarism is and what constitutes plagiarism in the US classroom. Students who plagiarize work in this class will be subject to the student code of conduct at Bridgewater State University. You can read that that policy by clicking on this link.
Syllabus/Policies Check-in Assignment
Good for you. You got to the end of the policies. To reward you, you have the opportunity to earn one "A" for Acceptable for a Discussion Board Post simply by completing the following assignment the end of the first week of classes.
1. Send me an email at [email protected], CC me at [email protected]
2. In the subject line, write "Syllabus Check-in Email". Write it exactly as I've written it here.
3. In the body of the email, include a greeting: "Hello LT," "Hi Professor Torda," "Hey Dr. Torda." Whatever. But have a greeting.
4. Cut and paste this sentence into the email: "I've read through the policies and syllabus for the course, and I understand how to use the blackboard to find out information about assignments, texts, course policies, due dates, and classroom expectations."
4. Ask me two questions about any thing on my website for our class: policies, due dates, classroom expectations, assignments. You can't tell me you have no questions. You have to ask me two.
5. Include a meme or tic-toc of your choosing or design that sums up how you are feeling about being in school so far.
6. Sign off on your email, "best, so & so" "see you in class, your name here" "sincerely, John Doe." Again, whatever. But sign off on your email.
If you would like to read sample evaluation letters from past classes, I've included them here. These are not for an ENGL 102 class but for the class I taught last semester. But they will give you a sense of how I comment on student writing.
Students in this course will develop knowledge of persuasive writing and rhetoric, learning and practicing various approaches to conducting research and to integrating the ideas of others into one’s own text. Emphasis is on writing longer and substantive texts that incorporate a variety of sources.
This course will give you intense practice in writing, reading and research in English, primarily for academic purposes. The thematic focus of our course will be a topic that should be of interest to you: attending university in the United States. What it means to attend college in the United States means different things to different people. For US citizens attending US colleges and universities, they must weigh the cost of attending university with the benefits of a college degree. A college degree seems to be required for more and more jobs, and yet a college degree is no guarantee of getting a job you want or a job that pays you enough to pay back college debt. And what about attending the right school? What even makes a school the right school?
While these are not the same questions that an international student who chooses to study abroad will ask, international students also have to answer questions for themselves. For instance, what is the value of studying abroad? How is study abroad viewed in your home country? Are there downsides to choosing to study abroad or earn a degree from a US school?
The question here is not simply, “compare the advantages and disadvantages of studying abroad”. Of course, you will start with a question like that, but the work we will do together will rely on formal and informal research to explore just how complex these questions are for us. In fact, I hope that you will show the complexities of studying abroad from a range of perspectives: for yourself, your family, and for the various communities you might be a part of.
These kinds of questions will be the focus of our research and writing in these four weeks. You will explore various research techniques including locating and evaluating source material, conducting interviews and surveys, and ethnographic research. You will write and respond to a variety of readings and you will write about your own research into the questions you are interested in asking. Finally, you will put together your materials in a final report, accompanied by a presentation that you will share with your classmates. You will get extensive practice in producing, collaborating, and revising writing that is appropriate for the university classroom.
While this course will be asynchronous, you will have the opportunity to work with each other and with me as we read, write, research these important topics together. It will be a challenging but exciting four weeks. Welcome!
Learning Objectives/Course Outcomes
In this course, students will
- Become familiar with conducting research through the use of electronic academic research tools, such as online catalogues and electronic research databases.
- Locate both primary and secondary source materials and evaluate their credibility.
- Approach research as a recursive process, consisting of a series of tentative hypotheses that are then tested and affirmed or revised.
- Effectively integrate secondary sources into their own texts, using an appropriate citation style, while demonstrating a clear awareness of the relationship of these sources to the writer’s central point and a clear distinction between the ideas and language of the writer and those of the sources.
Selections from They Say/I Say by Graff & Birkenstein, The New York Times, and other supplementary readings. All required texts will be provided to you electronically in a “TEXTS” folder in our class Blackboard site
Policies & Requirements
Attendance: This is an asynchronous course. Students will complete the work according to the schedule outlined in the syllabus. In order to successfully participate in class, students must post work to our class discussion board and/or submit writing for review by me or their peers by the deadlines outlined on our class syllabus. Students should expect that they will need to post between two and three times a week, depending on what other work is due that week. Students should expect to submit writing towards their final research project each of the four weeks.
Writing Conferences: Each week, Monday-Thursday, I set aside time to meet with students. There will be enough time slots each week for every student enrolled in the class to meet with me once a week to talk about their work, get feedback, support, and guidance. You should plan to meet with me at least two times during the four weeks the of our course. You can meet with me every week if you want to. Meetings are 20 minutes long. You should bring something you want to work on to each meeting. Meetings with me are part of how you earn your Informal writing/Discussion Board Post grade in this class. Failure to meet with me at least twice will negatively affect the 20% of your final grade you earn with the informal writing/discussion board post. NOTE: I’ve tried to identify a time that makes it convenient for you and for me to meet together online; however, if this time does not work out for you, email me and we can arrange a better time that works for you.
Informal writing/CLASS DISCUSSION BOARDPosts: Two to three times a week, students will be required to post 300 words to questions or discussions on our Class Discussion Board. You will have to post and respond to your classmates’ posts. You will also be a Respondent to the Discussion Board for the whole class. Discussion Board posts and responses count for 20% of your final grade in this class. Complete directions for the Discussion Board assignment will be available on our classroom site, including detailed information about how you will be evaluated.
Formal Writing/Research project: Each week, you will be responsible for drafting a part of your research final project. You will submit drafts in blackboard, get feedback from me and from your classmates, and complete a revision plan for each draft you submit. In the final week of the course, you will assemble the various parts of your research project and put it together in a final research report. There are four parts to your research projects (the percentages in the parenthesis shows the value of each assignment toward your final grade):
Week One: Positioning yourself as a researcher/formulating your question (10%)
Week Two: Answering your question part one: locating and evaluating online sources, summarizing, paraphrasing, quoting. (10%)
Week Three: Answering your question part two: conducting interviews and preparing your data, comparing and contrasting, ethical considerations in research. (10%)
Week Four: Reformulating your questions/Answering your question: Bringing together all the parts of your draft into a final product. (20%)
Researcher’s Notebook & Final Report/Presentation. At the end of the course, you will submit a portfolio that includes all the drafting work you’ve done on your research project. You will include drafts, revisions, reflections on your progress that you will be asked to submit every week as part of each of the four parts of the research project. In the researcher’s notebook, you will include a final reflection letter that asks you to reflect on what you’ve learned about reading, writing, and research in our class. Finally, you will create a 5-minute recorded Pecha Kucha— a recorded version of your research project using a voiceover and visuals that the rest of the class will watch and respond to. The Researcher’s Notebook & Final Presentation is worth 20% of your final grade.
Practice in Academic Writing Exercises. Each week, we will focus on some aspect of writing academic papers. These topics will include appropriate citation practices, grammar and punctuation practice, bibliography, and language specific to research and academic writing, etc. Each week you’ll have something to read or watch; you’ll practice your skills individually and in small groups; you’ll put what you’ve learned into your formal writing for that week. As part of that, you’ll reflect on how learning a particular skill affected your writing and research that week. You will earn your grade for this project based on effort rather than on mastery. Practice in Academic Writing Exercises will make up 10% of your final grade.
Evaluation
Information for the requirements for earning the “A”, “B,” and “C” grade are outlined for each assignment on the assignment page, all of which are located in the “assignments” folder on the Blackboard site for our course. If you do not complete the work required for one of those three grades, you will fail the course. There is no “D” grade. How much each assignment is worth towards your total grade is explained above and repeated here (as well as on each assignment page):
Discussion Board Posts, Responses, and summary 20%
Positioning yourself as a Researcher/Formulating
Your Question (750 words) 10%
Locating & Evaluating Sources Part I (750-1000 words) 10%
Locating & Evaluating Sources Part II (1000 words) 10%
The Research Notebook /Research Presentation
And Final Research Report (2500-3000 words) 20%
Practice in Academic Writing Exercises 10%
The way you will earn your grade in this class will be based on completing the list of tasks required of each task, your effort to include what you learn in our class in your own writing, and your thoughtful reflection on your learning and your revision each week and in your final researcher’s notebook.
Plagiarism: One of the conventions of writing in the US university that we will discuss is what plagiarism is and what constitutes plagiarism in the US classroom. Students who plagiarize work in this class will be subject to the student code of conduct at Bridgewater State University. You can read that that policy by clicking on this link.
Syllabus/Policies Check-in Assignment
Good for you. You got to the end of the policies. To reward you, you have the opportunity to earn one "A" for Acceptable for a Discussion Board Post simply by completing the following assignment the end of the first week of classes.
1. Send me an email at [email protected], CC me at [email protected]
2. In the subject line, write "Syllabus Check-in Email". Write it exactly as I've written it here.
3. In the body of the email, include a greeting: "Hello LT," "Hi Professor Torda," "Hey Dr. Torda." Whatever. But have a greeting.
4. Cut and paste this sentence into the email: "I've read through the policies and syllabus for the course, and I understand how to use the blackboard to find out information about assignments, texts, course policies, due dates, and classroom expectations."
4. Ask me two questions about any thing on my website for our class: policies, due dates, classroom expectations, assignments. You can't tell me you have no questions. You have to ask me two.
5. Include a meme or tic-toc of your choosing or design that sums up how you are feeling about being in school so far.
6. Sign off on your email, "best, so & so" "see you in class, your name here" "sincerely, John Doe." Again, whatever. But sign off on your email.
If you would like to read sample evaluation letters from past classes, I've included them here. These are not for an ENGL 102 class but for the class I taught last semester. But they will give you a sense of how I comment on student writing.
| 101_sample_evals__1_.pdf |
| sample_101_midterm_letters.pdf |