Most of your college papers will ask you to make an argument--to take a  stand.  But where should one stand when one makes an argument for college?   Where do other people stand?  What different position do people occupy in different disciplines?  What difference does it make where you stand?  In this class we will explore the standpoint of authors and writers.  We will read the New York Times  and other national and local newspapers on-line and we will try to work out what position each writer writes from:  what assumptions do they make about reading and writing? about their audience? about themselves? how do you react to those assumptions?  how do they influence what you read and how much you trust it?  How does it influence the kinds of things you might have to write about it?  what stands might you take as you write responses to your readings?  We will also read essays on writing and on research and ask the same questions.  Then we will explore the stances you  might make as an author of academic papers for different audiences and purposes.  Finally you will write a research paper exploring the different stances adopted by academics and others on a specific topic.  Your task is not to create one perfectly unified argument that might appear to be "truth."  Rather, your purpose is to explore in writing the debate--the similarities, differences, and overlaps--between the authors you read to help the people who read your paper come to a fuller understanding of the complexity of the issue and the factors which influence one's position on it.

The Work:

The writing in this class will be frequent and varied, ranging from informal "dialoging" (see below), through exercises, to a formal research paper, with many small papers and writing work-outs in between.  At times I will ask you to hand in two or more copies of a piece of writing so that we may evaluate it in class during workshops.  In order for you to practice writing in response to a number of different stimuli, I will design some specific writing assignments that everyone must complete, other assignments will be collectively designed by the class, and yet others will be of your individual choosing in response to what you have been reading and thinking over the course of the semester.  Because students come to college with different levels of preparation, we will work on issues of grammar, style, and general language use both in class in the context of our readings, and in conferences and individual projects.  Each student will help me to design an “individual writing program” which will build on areas of strength and develop two specific skills of each student's choosing.  Students will work on their program at their own pace, and will be graded on that work as part of the final grade for the course.
 

Informal Writing:

Research shows that frequent writing produces stronger, more fluent, and more comfortable writers.  Writing is a skill, and all skills need practice, so I suggest that you practice writing by keeping a Writer's Journal. Most of you have already kept such a journal (see handout if you would like to know more about this valuable form of writing workout);  however, for this class you are not required to keep a journal.

Instead of a journal, I will ask you to participate in weekly "dialogues" with me.  Once a week you will write me a letter.  In the first dialogue you will respond to class discussion, readings, and events on campus, in the state, the nation, or the world.  I will reply to your letter, and you will then reply to my reply, introducing new topics or raising questions as necessary.  Each student will converse in writing with me over the course of the semester, and in so doing will strengthen his or her critical thinking and overall writing skills.  This is a different kind of "thinking-in-writing" than journals require, but it will help you to achieve the same goal.

Your letters will be sent to me via e-mail (to either of the addresses listed above) by midnight each Friday.  If you send me more than one letter in any week, I will try to reply to each letter, although I may respond to all of them at once if they seem to be addressing the same theme. 

Collaborative Research:

In the world of the work place, and in many academic disciplines too, collaboration is the name of the game.  Corporations organize workers into teams responsible for conducting necessary research, identifying problems, brainstorming solutions, and then writing up what they find.  In this class you will engage in at least one project where the research is collaborative although the writing will be individual.  At first you may not like this kind of research, and with some cause as it involves cooperation, trust, and some loss of ego--things we have learned to avoid if possible.  Yet these team skills are also the very things that will make you successful in the workplace and, more important to me, in college.  There are a number of ways to research and write collaboratively, and you will learn them in this class.  There are also strategies to make it less painful, and you'll learn those too.  The end result will be worth it.  Collaborative research allows team members to find a lot more relevant material than individual research.
 

Course Structure and Goals:

English 1 is designed as a writing workshop where you will learn strategies for writing academic papers and improving your overall writing skills.  We will work on the basic skills of effective college-level writing, especially how we can use style, grammar, and word choice to create specific effects in written prose.  In this first section of the course you will practice writing definitions, summaries, classifications, and comparisons.  We will analyze the prose of others, imitate their writing strategies and prose styles, and summarize their points in a few sentences.  You will practice several expository forms including description and narration.  In the second section of the course we will focus on academic writing itself, beginning with what academic writers must do before they begin to write: you will learn how to analyze a topic/assignment, how to use all that you know to best respond to it, how to focus your knowledge and organize your ideas, and how to focus a topic for research.  You will select a research topic, find sources, and practice the skills learned in these first two segments of the course by compiling an annotated bibliography.  Next you will learn how to refine your relationship with your audience and structure a paper accordingly.  As you read the texts you have selected for your research, you will practice comparison, critique, and synthesis by writing about that material.   This will lead you to the final component of the course: a thesis-driven research paper.  You will strengthen your ability to focus a topic, write a research proposal, conduct additional research, formulate a thesis, plan a paper, and write an 8-10 page thesis-driven research paper.

At each stage of the process you will learn how to evaluate your own writing and that of others, making you a more effective editor and writer. As you become more of an expert writer, you will learn how to understand the writings of others more fully: how to perceive their thesis, analyze the assumptions they make about their audience and follow their overall patterns of organization. This, in turn, will make you more able to analyze questions and understand what you read.  It will also, I hope, help you to become a more confident writer who appreciates the power of written language, is able to use that power, and enjoys doing so!

Ground Rules:

A seminar is only as strong as its laziest member, so it is essential that each member of the seminar accepts her or his responsibility to the other members.  Thus:

1. You will be expected to attend every class prepared to participate and share your ideas and writing with your writing colleagues.  If you are unprepared, the workshop will not work, your colleagues will suffer, and you will be marked as absent.  Three unexplained absences will result in your final grade being lowered by one letter;
2. You must respect your fellow writers.  This means that you must take them and their ideas and writing seriously and comment constructively with sensitivity to their feelings.  Failure to do this will result in a collapse of the trust necessary for a workshop and you will be asked to leave (and marked as absent).  Lack of respect ranges from discriminating comments (homophobia, racism, sexism, etc.), to yawns, the pulling of faces, drumming fingers, laughter, asides to other members of the seminar, and so on.

Grades:

The grades for this course are assigned on the basis of the distance each writer travels during the semester in addition to the place each person has reached by the end of the course.  Specifically, grades will be based on the following:

1. Preparedness and contribution to class discussion and writer's workshops (10%):  Obviously if you do not attend class, sleep through it, or otherwise fail to participate I cannot assess the extent of your preparation, and will be forced to assume there was none.  Failure to attend conferences with me will lead me to the same conclusion.
2. Overall effort toward improvement (30%):  I will judge this on the basis of your weekly dialogues and the notes, drafts, and general writing assignments given in English 1, thus it is important that you keep drafts and notes, bring them to class, and put them in the relevant portfolios when you hand them in.  I will also determine your effort from our conferences and your visits to my office hours.
3. Application of the material covered in the class (60%):  This will be determined from the two portfolios you will compile, one in the middle and the other at the end of the semester.  Each portfolio will contain two papers and a preface in which you discuss the papers and the reasons you selected them rather than others you have written in this class.  These portfolios will be graded by me and by at least one other person teaching English 1 this semester.  Portfolio graders will be looking at the overall quality of the finished papers based on a list of skills that we will discuss in class (see handout).  The grades for the two portfolios will be divided as follows:

Texts:

Please buy the following:

• Chris Anson & Robert Schwegler's The Longman Writer's Companion  (the same book you used for your FYS and English 1-A)

• We will read the New York Time on-line, but the on-line edition (which is free) is only available for the day of publication (you must pay to read archived articles on-line), so you might want to pick up a free copy in the residence halls.

• You also need:

 °  a good dictionary—the heavier the better),
 °  pens of several colors (at least one green, purple or red),
 °  two plain loose paper manila folders to hold portfolio work,
 °  A LAN card & cable and a LAN account (and password)
 °  A computer disk to backup store your work for this class. 

Class Time:

This class meets in a seminar room for good reason.  Classes will be spent writing, workshopping or discussing writing, writing assignments and examples of writing produced by writers from a variety of discourse situations, including this class.

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