assignments ENGL226 Writing About Writing: WRITING STUDIES (composition & rhetoric)
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LEE TORDA 310 Tillinghast Hall Bridgewater State University 508.531.2436 ltorda@bridgew.edu www.leetorda.com |
FALL 2013 Office Hours
Monday & Wednesday: 3:30 to 4:30 Tuesday: 2:00 to 3:00 and by appointment. |
Overview. Sometime in the 1970s, American Higher Education saw a sea-change in the demographics that rocked the landscape of the University. Particularly hard hit were English departments. Open Admissions, a policy that gave access to more and more students who would not otherwise have had a chance to attend college--immigrant, first generation, less academically-prepared, financially at-risk, non-native speaking students--flooded the college classroom with students that other faculty all over the university deemed unfit writers. While some English faculty threw up their hands at the state of things, some folks became interested in thinking about how they could help these students become better prepared, become better writers and readers. And that is how the field of Rhetoric and Composition came to be. That was forty years ago and what started out as a field interested in thinking about new writes in the college classroom has expanded to cover a crazy-wide range of topics related to writing, writing instruction, rhetorical analysis (of just about anything you might even vaguely be able to call a text), the politics of literacy and literacy instruction, pedagogy, histories of writing instruction and text production, underrepresented rhetorics, the interwebs, and, sometimes, it feels like, the kitchen sink.
This section of the course is designed to give you 1) a brief background of how the field of Rhetoric and Composition came to be; 2) the most general sense of the kinds of scholarship this field focuses on and how it is different than what a scholar of literature would engage in; and 3) the opportunity to identify an area of scholarship that you yourself would be interested in exploring.
Details. We could spend an entire semester on the three items listed above, but we are spending roughly three weeks on it. Therefore, it is not really possible for you to research and write a scholarly argument in this new field. What is possible, though, is for you to read around in the field and develop what could possibly be an actual research paper. So, essentially, I'm asking you to do the front half of a research paper without actually having to do the research paper part.
You will be responsible for the following components for this project:
OTHER THINGS
We will workshop the annotations and the introduction in class at different times and in different ways. You will do a brief presentation of about five minutes to the class about what you learned on the class before the material is due. That due date (check the syllabus) is the day you will turn in your midterm portfolio. The completed version of this project is due as part of that portfolio.
This section of the course is designed to give you 1) a brief background of how the field of Rhetoric and Composition came to be; 2) the most general sense of the kinds of scholarship this field focuses on and how it is different than what a scholar of literature would engage in; and 3) the opportunity to identify an area of scholarship that you yourself would be interested in exploring.
Details. We could spend an entire semester on the three items listed above, but we are spending roughly three weeks on it. Therefore, it is not really possible for you to research and write a scholarly argument in this new field. What is possible, though, is for you to read around in the field and develop what could possibly be an actual research paper. So, essentially, I'm asking you to do the front half of a research paper without actually having to do the research paper part.
You will be responsible for the following components for this project:
- After class reading and discussion about what is possible to study in C&R, you will identify and clear with me a research focus.
- You will locate 7-10 articles that discuss your research focus. We will got to the library for some training in research in a specific field.
- After I model how to write an annotation and we practice it in class, you will annotate your 7-10 articles. This is an opportunity to practice some precision moves in your own academic writing style.
- Finally, you will write a three page, double-spaced, typed introduction to your annotations. Your introduction should tell us the following:
- What seems to be the central concerns of your topic?
- If you can tell, who are the important theorists or practitioners?
- Are there any debates among scholars going on about different aspects of the topic?
- What seems to be important to these scholars--what students, what ideas, what practices, what outcomes do they value?
OTHER THINGS
We will workshop the annotations and the introduction in class at different times and in different ways. You will do a brief presentation of about five minutes to the class about what you learned on the class before the material is due. That due date (check the syllabus) is the day you will turn in your midterm portfolio. The completed version of this project is due as part of that portfolio.