Syllabus
English 1100 046: Foundations of College Writing
Spring 2015
Contact Information and Office Hours
Instructor: Mr. Colin M. Griffin
Email: griffinco13@students.ecu.edu
Phone: 252-328-4282 (no voicemail)
Office: Bate 2025
Office Hours: Monday 1:00pm-2pm;Tuesday 1:00pm-3:00pm (or by appointment)
**Important Course Requirement**
As the semester progresses, keep all of your projects, including all drafts, all peer review comments, and all feedback from me. You will need this material to complete the final major assignment in the course.
Course Description from Catalog and Purpose
Foundations of College Writing is an introduction to expository, analytical, and research-based academic writing. Instruction in critical reading; developing, supporting, and organizing ideas; drafting and revising; understanding grammatical conventions; proofreading and editing; and other important aspects of the writing process.
Successful writing is purposeful and audience-specific. It requires writers to reflect carefully on their decisions and those of other writers. Writers must also be aware of the conventions that guide those decisions. Writers must also employ strategies for generating ideas, organizing materials, drafting, and editing their own work.
English 1100 will promote your facility with critical reading and writing by helping you to do the following:
- Discover significant questions to explore and address via writing
- Explore the many different purposes of writing, including writing to reflect, analyze, explain, and persuade
- Practice drafting and revising
- Increase your awareness of organizational strategies and your ability to apply them
- Become attentive to how audience and purpose affect content, tone, and style
- Incorporate sufficient and appropriate details and examples both from your experiences and from secondary research
- Express your ideas with clarity and with effective syntax and punctuation
- Gain competence in using computer technology in the writing process
- Schedule and meet deadlines.
You will write extensively, both formally and informally, often for every class meeting, and you must be prepared to share your writing with your peers on a regular basis. You will be asked to write in a variety of genres, most of which will involve multiple pages of revised prose.
Writing Intensive (WI)
English 1100 is a writing intensive course in the Writing Across the Curriculum Program at East Carolina University. With committee approval, this course contributes to the twelve-hour WI requirement for students at ECU. Additional information is available at the following site: http://www.ecu.edu/writing/wac/.
University Writing Portfolio
In addition to uploading your course material to your English 1100 2014-15 Portfolio, you will also submit material to a University Writing Portfolio.
University Writing Portfolio Upload Requirement
This course is designated “writing intensive” (WI) because, in addition to providing you with important content to learn, it has been designed to help you improve as a writer. Several years ago, ECU’s University Writing Program instituted the WI graduation requirement (6 hours of WI coursework beyond English 1100 and 1200/2201, at least 3 hours of which must be in the major) with the goal of preparing students to be effective writers. As a university, we want to see how well we are doing in meeting that goal.
To assist with this effort, you will submit one major writing project, along with a description of the assignment for that project and brief responses to four questions about your writing, near the end of this course. These materials will be uploaded to your “University Writing Portfolio,” which you will access and create (if you have not already done so in a previous WI course) through the “student portfolio” link in Pirate Port.
Each year, representatives of ECU’s University Writing Program will randomly select a set of University Writing Portfolios from recently graduated students to assess how effectively ECU’s writing programs meet the needs of ECU students. The assessment work of the University Writing Program has no bearing on your grades: assessments will be done after a student graduates. Moreover, results of University Writing Portfolio assessments will only be used to improve instruction for future students and will never be reported in any way that connects those results to individual students.
Additional information about creating your University Writing Portfolio and uploading your materials will be provided during the semester. Further assistance with this process will also be available online (www.ecu.edu/writing) and in person at the University Writing Center (www.ecu.edu/writing/uwc), located in Joyner Library.
Texts and Course Costs
Bullock, Richard and Francine Weinberg. The Norton Field Guide to Writing with Handbook. 3rd
- NY: Norton, 2013. Print. ISBN: 978-0-393-93977-4
Pirate Papers for ENGL 1100. 6th ed. 2014. ISBN: ISBN 978-1-4534-0086-9.
Moore, Wes. The Other Wes Moore. NY: Spiegel and Grau, 2011. Print. ISBN: 978-0-385-52820-7
You will be required to make photocopies or print-outs of the sources you use in the major writing assignments. You may be asked to provide multiple copies of drafts for peer review.
University Writing Center
Should you find yourself in want of extra assistance with your course projects, I encourage you to make use of the writing assistance provided by the University Writing Center, particularly Bate Center. Bate Center, located in Bate 2005, is staffed by English graduate students who will work with you at any stage of your writing process. While Bate Center does accept walk-ins if a consultant is available at the time of the walk-in, it is a very good idea to make an appointment ahead of time at https://ecu.mywconline.com or call 252.328.6399. Appointments begin on the hour and last about 45 minutes. Bring your assignment description and any other material you think will help the consultant understand the assignment.
Major Assignments
Each of the writing projects for this course will have a specific due date during the semester. On this due date, you will submit your work, including all drafts and peer responses, to me for feedback and grading.
The Course Portfolio
As the last major project for the class—in place of a final examination—you will do the following:
- Based on feedback from your peers and from me, revise two projects significantly. In other words, your revisions should involve more than simply editing or moving a few things around. In the event that you cannot identify ways your assignments could be made more effective for their original audience(s) and/or purpose(s) through significant revision, you should come speak with me about revising one or both of your assignments for a new audience and/or purpose.
- Compile a portfolio that includes these two revised assignments, along with all drafts of and feedback on those assignments. This material should be gathered neatly in a file or pocket folder (not a 3-ring binder), and all components of the portfolio should be clearly labeled. All final drafts included in the portfolio, as well as the cover letter, will be uploaded to iWebfolio.
- Compose a cover letter to turn in with the portfolio. The cover letter should explain and justify the changes you have made to the two pieces of writing you have revised. In addition, the letter should identify and explain what you believe is effective in these two writing projects and what you believe could yet be improved. I will be paying particular attention to how well your letter reflects an awareness of the rhetorical strategies that are present in your writing. More information about the cover letter will be distributed during the semester.
Project 1: Writing to Reflect
- You will be asked to offer a critical analysis reflecting on a personal experience. I will provide you with specific guidelines for your assignment.
- The audience for this project is your 1100 classmates.
- Your writing should convey and explain the significance of the event and explain what your reader might learn from the experience. As stated in the NFG, “reflective essays are our attempt to think something through by writing about it and to share our thinking with others” (214). We will look at several sample reflections in class to give you a better idea of the kinds of events you might narrate and the strategies you might use. You must carefully describe event(s) for your audience, keeping in mind that most of your classmates are not familiar with your individual background, but you also need to be sure that your reflection does more than just relate or summarize events: it should help your reader to think critically about the events.
- Your reflection should be +/-1200 words (or 5 pages in MLA format).
You should turn in all drafts, peer review feedback, and a brief cover letter with the final draft (details about the cover letter will be provided in class). **I will not grade your project if you do not turn in drafts and a cover letter. Failure to submit peer review feedback will negatively affect your grade.
Project 2: Writing to Analyze
This assignment asks you to consider how writers respond to context, purpose, and audience. The steps of the assignment are as follows
- In a paper of +/- 1400 words (about 6 pages in MLA format), identify and explain rhetorical strategies that a text uses to try to persuade the audience to accept, or at least seriously consider the writer’s purpose. I will provide you with specific guidelines including who the audience is for this assignment.
- We will discuss rhetorical strategies in class, but you will want to identify and try to explain things such as persona/ethos, tone and style, types of evidence used, writing conventions followed, visual elements used, and other ways in which the writers attempt to achieve their purposes with their audiences.
You must turn in a copy of your sources with your analysis. You will also submit a brief cover letter with the final draft (details about this letter will be provided in class). **I will not grade your project if you do not turn in drafts, copies of sources, and your cover letter. Failure to submit peer review feedback will negatively affect your grade.
Project 3: Writing to Persuade
This project asks you to create an argument, following the guidelines in the NFG (135-49), in which you analyze elements of The Other Wes Moore in relation to a particular context. In order to do this effectively, you should use the close-reading skills you developed working on the rhetorical analysis essay. Your essay should include a healthy balance of quotes and concepts from The Other Wes Moore and from the context that you have placed your analysis of it in. Both of these should serve your own ideas and argument.
To help you with this close reading and analytical work, you will divide into groups and be responsible for presenting on designated sections of the text. Your groups will provide a summary and glossary; contextual information (e.g., cultural, historical, political); and discussion questions. More information will be provided on how this will work.
The Writing to Persuade project is your own interpretation, not a re-crafted research paper. You are not presenting facts or giving your reader a summary of your research; rather, you are making a claim about specific aspects of the text and using the context as part of your argument. You should have four to six secondary sources. You must also determine an appropriate audience and format for your argument. In other words, you need to determine who should or would want to hear your argument and what form of writing (letter? website? article? essay?) would be most effective in reaching that audience.
Your argument should be +/-1800 words (about 7½ pages), and you must turn in copies of your sources with your work. You will also submit a brief cover letter with the final draft (details about this letter will be provided in class). **I will not grade your project if you do not turn in drafts, copies of sources, and your cover letter. Failure to submit peer review feedback will negatively affect your grade.
Late Work
I do not accept late work unless specific, documented emergencies prevent you from completing something on time.
Note that technological failures are not excuses for late work. The best course of action is to
BACK UP ALL OF YOUR WORK! There are many options available for you to do so. Take
advantage of them.
E-mail Policy
I will only engage in e-mail communications from ECU email addresses. PLEASE do not send me e-mails from Yahoo, Gmail, or equivalent account providers. Please allow me 24 hours to respond to e-mail messages. I WILL NOT respond to e-mail received after 5pm on Friday afternoons until 8am the following Monday.
I am your instructor. Please refrain from the use of “text-speak” in e-mail communications with me. This helps to ensure that messages are clearly conveyed and that all involved parties stay on the same page.
I advise you to check your email at least twice a day to ensure that you stay current with any updates that concern this course. “I didn’t get the e-mail” is not a legitimate excuse.
Class Citizenship
By class citizenship, I am referring to your efforts to make this a successful class for yourself, for your fellow students, and for your instructor.
Some things you can do to earn a high grade in this area are
- come to class consistently and be attentive while you are here
- participate actively and productively in peer review sessions
- be present for all announced and unannounced quizzes
- bring your texts and other class materials to every class
- complete readings thoroughly and on time, and
- participate productively in class discussions.
Some things you can do to earn a low grade in this area are*
- miss peer review or bring insufficient work to peer review
- arrive late or leave during class
- read or focus on non-related course material including that accessed through technology
- sleep in class
- use cell phones without permission during class
- show disrespect for the views of others
- hold side conversations during class, and
- participate in any activities that do not contribute positively to the learning environment in the classroom.
*Please be aware that, in addition to the negative effects these poor citizenship practices will have on your class citizenship grade, they can be grounds for more serious disciplinary action, including removal from the course.
Technology Policy
The use of academic technology is permitted in this class. HOWEVER, the use of said technology for non-academic purposes is prohibited. This includes, but is not limited to, web surfing, social media use, playing games, and texting. If you engage in academically inappropriate technology use, the penalty will be a 25 point deduction from your class citizenship grade FOR THE FIRST OFFENSE. Subsequent offenses will result in the student being marked absent for that class meeting.
Attendance
In order to be successful in this class, your regular attendance is essential. Class meetings will be used to complete in-class writing assignments and group work, to participate in peer review activities, to receive information about assignments and expectations, and to discuss reading material. Beyond the damage absences can have on your class citizenship grade, missing more than 4 class meetings of a MWF class or more than 3 class meetings of a TR class without full documentation of a university-excused absence will lower your course grade 1/3 a letter grade for each additional class absence. Your grade can be lowered even down to an “F” if the absences continue. I will send you a written warning when your course grade begins to suffer due to missed classes.
Being routinely late to class, or leaving class prior to its scheduled time of dismissal, will also negatively impact your overall course grade. Three (3) instances of being tardy or leaving early (combined) will be equivalent to one (1) absence, and will impact your grade accordingly. Being late to class more than 15 minutes will automatically constitute an absence.
Official University absences (https://www.ecu.edu/cs-studentaffairs/dos/excused_absences.cfm) will be recognized, although I will expect you to hand in work prior to your absence unless we have discussed a different option. If you need to be absent for any reason, it is very important that you make me aware of your absence as soon as possible.
Plagiarism
The ECU student handbook defines plagiarism as “Copying the language, structure, ideas, and/or thoughts of another and adopting same as one’s own original work.” You may access the student handbook definition at http://www.ecu.edu/cs-studentlife/policyhub/academicintegrity.cfm.
Be aware that the writing you do for this course must be your work and, primarily, your words. It is acceptable to incorporate the words or ideas of others in support of your ideas, but when you do so, you should be sure to cite the source appropriately. We will talk about citing and avoiding plagiarism during the course.
Penalties for plagiarism are severe—if I become aware of any intentional attempt to plagiarize (e.g. knowingly submitting someone else’s work as your own, downloading a paper from the Internet, etc.), you will be given an “F” for the course and a report will be filed with the Office of Student Rights and Responsibilities, the office which maintains reports from all university faculty and staff regarding academic integrity violations. If you are caught cheating or plagiarizing a second time, in this course or in any other course while you are at ECU, you can be suspended or even expelled from the university. Be sure to see me if you have any questions about plagiarism before you turn in an assignment.
Accommodation of Special Needs
East Carolina University seeks to fully comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Students requesting accommodation based on a covered disability must go to the Department for Disability Services, located in Slay 138, to verify the disability before any accommodations can occur. Their telephone number is 252.737.1016, and their email is dssdept@ecu.edu. I am more than willing to help make this class accessible to all students.
Weather/Campus Emergencies
In case of adverse weather, or other campus emergency, critical information will be posted on the campus web site and announced on the campus hotline: 252.328.0062.
Continuity of Instruction
During a pandemic or catastrophic event, and after all face-to-face instruction has been suspended, communication for our class will take place through ECU email and Blackboard. In the event of such an emergency, check your ECU email account for instructions.
Grading
| Assignment | % of Course Grade |
| Writing to Reflect | 15% |
| Writing to Analyze | 20% |
| Writing to Persuade | 20% |
| Course Portfolioand Cover Letter | 25% |
| Presentation/Leading Discussion | 10% |
| Class Citizenship | 10% |
Grading Scale
| Letter grades | % Distribution | Quality points |
| A | 95-100 | 4.0 |
| A- | 90-94 | 3.7 |
| B+ | 87-89 | 3.3 |
| B | 84-86 | 3.0 |
| B- | 80-83 | 2.7 |
| C+ | 77-79 | 2.3 |
| C | 74-76 | 2.0 |
| C- | 70-73 | 1.7 |
| D+ | 67-69 | 1.3 |
| D | 64-66 | 1.0 |
| D- | 60-63 | 0.7 |
| F | Below 60 | 0 |
Final Exam Meeting Time
Attendance during the final exam period is mandatory. The final exam for this course will take place on Monday, May 4th from 11:00am to 1:30pm in Bate 1019.
