About the Class

Class Location: online in iCollege

Class meetings: Tuesdays/Thursdays 4:45 pm – 7:15 pm*

Office Hours: Thursdays 4:00 – 6:00 pm, and by appointment (email me to set up a time)* (I can also meet any Tuesday during class time when we are not holding class)

*Our class will hold some class meetings, but much of the work will be done asynchronously. Please note class sessions where we will meet together, synchronously – these will likely include workshops, peer reviews, and project introductions. This also means that office hours are extremely important – see me for questions, concerns, clarification, etc. My virtual door is open.

Course Catalog Description

This course builds on writing proficiencies, reading skills, and critical thinking skills developed in ENGL 1101.  It also introduces and incorporates several research methods in addition to persuasive and argumentative techniques.  These techniques will be practiced through an investigation of cultural conversations which closely link to readings and conversations that occur beyond the classroom. This process allows us to understand the process of conveying organized and measured thought both inside and outside of the classroom. A passing grade is C. 

Prerequisite:  C or above in ENGL 1101.

Course Outcomes

By the end of this course, students should be able to:

• Engage in writing as a process, including various invention heuristics (brainstorming, for example), gathering evidence, considering audience, drafting, revising, editing, and proofreading.
• Engage in the collaborative, social aspects of written composition, and use these as tools for learning.
• Use language to explore and analyze contemporary multicultural, global, and international questions.
• Demonstrate how to use composition aids, such as handbooks, dictionaries, online aids, and tutors.
• Gather, summarize, synthesize and explain information from various sources.
• Use grammatical, stylistic, and mechanical formats and conventions appropriate for a variety of audiences, but particularly the formal academic audience that makes up the discourse community with which you will also become more familiar in this course.
• Critique your and others’ work in written, visual and oral formats.
• Produce coherent, organized, readable compositions for a variety of rhetorical situations.

Required Texts

• Lopez, Elizabeth Sanders, Andrea Jurjević, and Megan E. Malone. Guide to First-Year Writing, 7th Edition. Fountainhead P, 2019. Digital Edition. Tophat Digital Version.
• Supplemental readings in iCollege

About Writing

We are going to do a lot of writing in this course. My philosophy is that the more you write the more proficient you will become. The good news is that the writing and reading skills you acquire will be applicable to all your future endeavors, both professional and personal. What you learn in this course can help you with writing in your other academic classes, with writing in your chosen career or workplace, and with civic or personal writing tasks. Communicating effectively through writing is an invaluable skill.  You will be able to draw on your own experiences and interests throughout the course and I will introduce you to other ideas and approaches to those ideas.

Our Discourse Community

GSU is dedicated to supporting a positive environment for all students, where we all always treat one another with respect. As a class, we are a discourse community – a group of individuals that have “goals or purposes and use communication to achieve these goals” (John Swales). This idea relies upon the supposition that each community member has some sort of experience or expertise to contribute to the community. In short, we are a think tank whose common goal is to develop a deeper understanding of how to (1) communicate academically, (2) mine and interpret valid evidence, and (3) engage in the development of knowledge.

I ask that you engage respectfully in class. Respect your classmates. This extends to all aspects of engagement, from personal pronouns and differences of opinion; address each other with kindness and with a spirit of curiosity and intellectual growth; and, bring your scholarly identities with you into our virtual spaces.

Attendance and Deadlines

Attendance during our synchronous classes is expected and integral to success in the course. While it may be tempting to just push through and read the modules/textbook in an online setting, that will not be enough to succeed in this course. As noted in the Assessments section of the syllabus below, a significant portion of your grade relies on your participation in your Working Groups. Those groups do not work without you, so it is imperative that you make time to engage in the class. If you feel you need a more asynchronous class, reach out to me so we can find a course that suits your needs more fully.

The attendance policy for this course is easy: you can “miss” any two participation activities except for peer review in Work Groups. Those missed participation days will be dropped from your grade. I do ask that you let your group members know when you will be absent though. You are working in a small group of five, so your group members rely on you for feedback and to do your part.

Academic Expectations

I default to the trust that you will complete your own work and take the time to do it right, as an action of respect for your own intellectual growth. In the end, intentional plagiarism is damaging and sells your own capabilities short. If you are ever unsure what may or may not be plagiarism, please do not hesitate to ask me.  In fact, I welcome your questions because learning about those nuances is part of the plan. 

The Department of English plagiarism policy is clear and refers to every piece of writing you do for class, drafts, reading responses, and finished essays alike. Any work that is submitted in this class that is plagiarized or violates the university academic honesty policy will receive an automatic “0” for the assignment grade. Furthermore, I may refer you to the College of Arts and Sciences for further disciplinary action or course penalties.

GSU’s Policy on Plagiarism: https://codeofconduct.gsu.edu/files/2019/07/2019_7_3_Academic_Honesty.pdf.

The Work

You will engage in several types of work over the semester. Each element builds on other work you are doing. See the chart for a breakdown of percentages, and read the overviews below to get a sense of how we will spend our time. 

Class Participation & Low Stakes Assignments  15%

All the preparatory/daily work you will do throughout the course falls under this umbrella. Individual, low stakes writing activities give you an opportunity to practice new skills. Working groups offer you a place to practice and discuss with others.

Overall, participation does not only measure your attendance (which it admittedly helps me do), it also (and more importantly) serves as a space for you to revisit initial concepts with others in a conscious way in order to further evaluate and synthesize concepts.

About Working Groups

If we were meeting face-to-face, more of our meetings would be taken up with in-class group work than lecture. Working in groups exposes us to different ways of thinking and provides us with small space in which we can give and receive feedback. Those discussions are important and focus to talk through, justify, and explore our critical thinking and creative communications.

Working Groups are our digital version of small-group work. However, instead of pairing students off for each task, I have randomly placed you into static groups for the semester. So, while sometimes we might participate in full class discussions, most of the time your daily work and peer reviews will occur within your Working Groups.

Quizzes & Surveys        5%

The quizzes are small but mighty! They will help assess your initial comprehension of the concepts introduced in the modules and chapter texts. These quizzes are brief, narrowly focused, and help gauge your readiness to proceed forward. You may be tempted to rush through them, but don’t!

You may also be asked to participate in the occasional survey. Surveys help me figure out the best way to execute our course online, learn more about you, and get quick feedback about the success of an assignment. Surveys are “pass/fail” so if you do the survey, you receive full points.

Major Projects

Project 1: Visual Analysis      20%

The Visual Analysis project allows you to practice an in-depth evaluation of multimodal texts, while generating an essay that is multimodal, itself. Additionally, it offers you practice at understanding visual rhetoric by focusing on a specific example. But it also helps you to see the rhetorical situation in action, understand the importance of audience, and consider what evidence and scholarship might look like in different contexts.

Project 2: Annotated Bib with Precis    15%

The Annotated Bibliography is a very specific, highly focused academic genre of writing. It is unique in that the audience for the bib is most immediately the author, themselves. Bibs are used to keep track of, evaluate, organize, and develop research. We will use the rhetorical precis (another new genre we will learn) to help build our annotations for each bibliographic entry. This assignment is perhaps the most overt example of practicing new academic writing and research skills – you will most likely be asked to write these again at some point in your academic career.

Project 3: Archival Research Paper  45%

This project is a natural extension of projects 1 and 2. While you evaluate images in project 1, you will be evaluating and using archival objects and ephemera in project 3. The Archival Research paper will use the research you gather in project 2 and develop an archival project. In preparation for this assignment, you will also learn more about primary research, archival methodologies, and apply your what you have learned about visual analysis to material artifacts.