-
-
Unit 1: How do you read
and write?
- As you can see below, you will be writing each week.
Rather than reading a book every few weeks, as is
common in upper-division English classes, you will develop lines lines of inquiry
into what you have learned and how you can use it. As with most of what you have done in college, you will get out
of the assignments what you put into them. Our class only meets once a
week, so you will have a week's assignments for each class, If you wait to
do them until the night before you class, you will not get as much out of them as
you will if you work on them through the week.
- 1/11 introduction to the course
- We will discuss the goals of this "capstone course" for your undergraduate
studies, the structure of the course, and the ways it can
serve your needs. Then we will downshift to some specifics and
examine how we have learned to read stories and poems, focusing
particularly on Holst's
"Zebra Storyteller," Hemingway's "Very Short Story,"
and Harjo's "Autobiography." From our readings of these
texts, we will develop some generalizations about genre and the strategies
that can be used to interpret and compose more diverse genres than are
included within traditional concepts of "literature." You will
break up into groups reflect upon all this, and then we will look more
specifically at the assignments for the coming weeks.
- 1/18 composing a sense of yourself as a writer in
college
-
- We will continue our discussions of how you write by examining the courses that are the only universal requirements
in the undergraduate curriculum: first-year composition courses. We will
discuss how these courses served your needs then and how they compare to
what you read and write now, with your literacy logs as our point of
reference for what you read and write on a weekly basis.
-
- Assignment for class:
- Document your week as a writer and reader, and begin gathering
your past writings. Every time that you pick up a book or a pen or
turn on the computer, note the time, and write a little when you get
done--just informal notes to yourself about what you did and why you
did it. Gather your previous writings together, and reflect back
over what you wrote and read in the last few years. Remember how
you wrote, and review your instructors' responses to what you wrote.
Don't focus on the grades but on how the task of writing was
set out in your classes, how you undertook the work of writing, and
how your writing developed through differing assignments and
responses. Using your notes on what you wrote and read this week and
over the last several years, write at least three pages. Feel
free to be playful, and do not worry about editing. This writing
is for you, though you should be ready to read one part of it (100
words or so) in class.
-
-
- Look through A Student's Guide to First-Year Composition and
consider how its assumptions, goals, and emphases relate to how you
work and play with writing. Be prepared to direct the class
discussion to specific points in the textbook that seem useful, wrong,
or strange.
-
-
- Browse around the resource page and reflect on what you want to
learn from this class. Be prepared to ask questions and
suggest what you want the class to include.
-
- 1/25 reading and writing in general and in english
- class meets in CCIT 311
-
- We will then follow through your program of study to look at the general
education and English courses that you took to reflect upon what it all
meant and what you can learn from what you learned.
-
- Assignment for class:
- Review of one of the classes that you took that helped you
improve your writing and reading. Outline what you learned and
how and when you learned it. Examine the specific papers and
assignments in the class. How was what you learned evident or
not evident in what you wrote? Reexamine what you wrote about,
including the notes, the text or whatever evidence you have of what
you wrote.
-
-
- Examine the general education curriculum at the University of
Arizona, the principles that distinguish and organize the
different areas, specific courses that are currently offered, and the
overall purposes that the general education program is meant to
achieve. Be prepared to offer a "reading" of the
general education program that is guided by a specific interpretation
and includes particular details from the program, its parts, and
individual courses. This reading may be stated as a claim
("The general education program tries to achieve X by doing Y as
is evident in Z from this course") or as a research question
("How is the this overall purpose achieved by dividing up courses
in this way or by having this course defined in this way?").'
- Here are some sites on the general education program at the University
of Arizona that can help you with this assignment:
-
General education
in a nutshell
-
Guidelines for
writing-intensive requirement of general education
- Expected
outcomes for general education
-
-
- Write a draft of the first essay and bring it to class on a
disk so that we can post it to Caucus.
(Rough draft due 1/23, final draft due 2/1)
Send the paper to me as an attachment via
email before class and bring a hard copy to class.
- In the first essay (roughly 750 words), you will analyze the reading of a text or texts that you developed in an essay you
wrote for a previous class. In a literacy log that will serve as a
discovery draft for the essay and is required for submission along with
the essay, you will record and reflect upon how you read and write on a
daily basis and in general. To write the essay itself, you will
review the papers you have written and the responses that you have
received, and then use a particular paper to focus some of your
reflections on your reading and writing. Some of these questions may help you
to think about your background as a reader and writer: Do you like to
read, to write?
Why? Think back to a book that you really enjoyed reading or a
piece you enjoyed writing.
Why did you enjoy it, and how did you read or write it? What do you read
and/or write each
day? Consider how you read and write more mundane texts. What parts
do you read, and why do you focus on them? How do you begin with
writing? What comes easily and is most fun? What is hardest or
most mysterious about writing for you? How much time do you
spend reading and writing on average each week? Why did you choose a
major that demands so much reading and writing?
How have your reading and writing changed over the years? What
are your strengths and weaknesses as a reader and writer, and how are you
going to build upon the former to alleviate the latter?
Consider these questions as you review
what you have written and the
responses you received to the essays that you wrote in previous
classes. If you have questions about this assignment, post them to
our listserve.
Weekly Assignments
2/1 what's an english major for?
- class meets in CCIT 311
- We will look at the English major at the University of Arizona in the
context of broader trends in undergraduate education, with the Boyer
Commission Report as our point of reference.
-
- Assignments for class:
- Send me a copy of Essay 1 as an email attachment and bring a hard copy
to class. Remember that there are penalties for late
submissions.
-
- Assess the Undergraduate English major, focusing on how your
studies and departmental courses offerings match up with the Outcomes for
the major. You should refer to the outcomes for the major in the
Undergraduate English Course Description Catalogue that I gave you in
class on 1/18. If you have limited access to the internet outside of
class, you may use the course offerings in the Catalogue for this
assignment, but the on-line
offerings and the rest of the undergraduate studies homepage may be a
better data set.
-
- Read Reinventing Undergraduate Education. Read the Boyer
Commission Report on line or down load a copy
to a disk, send it to yourself as an email attachment to read on your
computer at home, or just print it out. The Report is thirty-five pages
long.
Remember you are reading for a purpose--to examine questions about how
your undergraduate studies compare to a influential model for
undergraduate reform and to reflect upon what you have learned and need to
learn.
-
- Decide on a line of research to develop your assessment of your
undergraduate studies. In class we will set up research teams to
explore lines of inquiry that you want to pursue. These research
questions readily suggest themselves, but you may want to set out in other
directions.
-
- How do professors and students understand the purposes of
the English major? This group would enable you to interview professors
and others to learn more about what goes on in English departments and how
the environment of the discipline has shaped your studies and could shape
graduate studies in the field.
-
- How does the English major compare to other majors?
This group could be useful for double majors or others who are thinking
about going to graduate school in an area other than English. You
might compare requirements, the differences between what the disciplines do
and how they do it, or opportunities in the fields.
-
- How does what you learned prepare you to teach? This
group will look at certification processes and/or consider how your
experiences as a student, reader and writer can provide you with resources
for teaching English
-
- How does the English major prepare you to leave school and
find work? This line of inquiry could be useful if you are not
interested in graduate school and want to explore jobs other than teaching.
-
- 2/8 what are some alternative models for what you studied?
- class meets in CCIT 311
-
- We will workshop drafts of your second essay, review several of the
essays that were submitted for the first assignment, and work in the
groups that you selected last class to advance the inquiries you chose to
develop in preparation for the class presentations on 2/15 to Professor
Laura Berry.
-
- Assignments for class:
- Post the draft of your paper to the Caucus site by Tuesday,
February 6 at 5:00.
-
- Write reviews of the drafts posted by the members of your
team.
-
- Meet with me during office hours to discuss your plans if you want to
submit a course contract with alternative assignments.
-
- Select at least one undergraduate major that could serve as a model for
change that would serve the needs of students. From the websites
of English departments from around the world, come to class with
specifics on how and why you think the program of study offered by another
English department could serve as a model for reforms of the English major
here at the University of Arizona.
-
-
- 2/15 what needs to done to improve our undergraduate major,
- and how can you represent what you have learned through it?
-
- class meets in ML 313
- In the first half of class, each of the research groups will give an
informal presentation of 10 minutes to Professor Laura Berry, the
Undergraduate Advisor the English major here, and in the second half of
class we will discuss how to inventory your experiences and expertise to
begin the process of composing resumes, job applications or graduate
school applications.
-
- Assignments for class:
- Your second essay is due by class. Send it to me as an attachment via
email before class and bring a hard copy to class.
-
- Be prepared to provide Professor Laura Berry with specific assessments on
how you think the undergraduate major served your needs, how well it helped
you achieve the objectives that have been set for it, and how you think it
might be improved, following up on the specific lines of inquiry that your
group began with in class on 2/1.
-
-
(Rough draft due 2/8, revision due 2/15)
- Post the rough draft to our Caucus site.
- Send the revision to me as an attachment via
email before class and bring a hard copy to class.
The second essay calls for you to reflect upon how you
learned to read and write against a context that shaped or will
shape that ongoing process. You began this process of reflection and
analysis with the first essay, and parts of that essay could be redeveloped
for this essay. For example, a class or essay that you discussed in
the first essay could also be used to support your analysis in this
essay. The focus in this assignment shifts from how you learned to
read and write to how that learning was shaped by a broader context.
That context could be the assumptions and goals of the English major, the
broader environment of undergraduate studies, the differences between majors
you studied, or the goals that you will pursue after
graduation. In the roughly four page essay, you could develop an
analysis of how your studies will prepare you for a specific job or program
of study, or you could simply continue the line of reflection that you began
with the last essay. In either case, you will need well-defined
specifics and a clearly developed line of inquiry, but you may cast the
essay as a literacy narrative that tells the story of what you have learned,
as an evaluation of the program of study that you are about to complete, or
as an inquiry into what you need to learn to achieve your goals.
3. What do you want to do with
this learning?
- 2/22 so how do i get their from here?
- class meets in CCIT 311
- In groups, you will discuss the drafts of the reviews you wrote,
and your collaborators will give you additional feedback on the responses that
they wrote. Then, in the second half of class, we will discuss the books
that you reviewed and your responses to the reading from Williams's book on
style.
-
- Assignments for class:
- Post the draft of your paper to the Caucus site by Tuesday,
February 20 at 5:00.
-
- Write reviews of the drafts posted by the members of your
team.
-
- Read pages 1-37 in Williams's Style, Ten Lessons in Clarity and
Grace, and come to class ready to discuss how it supports or
contradicts what you have been taught about style. Reflect back
over what instructors wrote on papers, what your classmates told you in
workshops, and other rules that you have made up for yourself. Be
ready to share one rule with us (such as never ending a sentence with
preposition). Think of rules you are unsure of or have heard
contradictory ideas about. Where do such rules come from? Is
there a kernel of truth in them? How do know what is a rule and what
is not?
- 3/1 name that problem
- class meets in CCIT 311
- We will discuss the readings from Williams's book, and we will
work with samples of your writing to discuss the problems and ideas in the
readings.
-
- Assignments for class:
- Send your paper to me as an attachment to email before class and
bring a hard copy to class.
-
- Read Williams's Style pages 39-96 and do exercises
3.13 (page 63) and 4.8 (page 92). Send me these exercises as a second
attachment to your email.
-
(Rough draft due 2/22, revision due 3/1)
- Post the rough draft to our Caucus site.
- Send the revision to me as an attachment via
email before class and bring a hard copy to class.
As noted on the syllabus for the course, this essay is a
three-page review of a book that will help you achieve the goals that you
want to pursue after graduation. Possible books are included on Arizona
State's English Department career web page.
You may write the book review for students such as yourself, or you may write it
in a more formal style if you prefer. In either case, you should cite at
least two other related books that you have looked at in the introduction, and
you should inform your reader why the book that you chose is more useful than
those books. The body of the essay should summarize the content of the
book in some detail, and your summary and the concluding evaluations should be
supported with specifics from the book. The essay will be evaluated by how
well you develop your response by effectively summarizing the argument of the
book, developing a unified analysis of the book, and including apt specifics to
support your points.
If you are planning on doing a website for the fifth assignment,
then you may wish to do an alternative review of related websites for this
assignment. If you select this alternative then, you should consult
the web development guides and evaluation sites in the computer
section of the resource page. You should evaluate at least one site in
depth, using links in the essay, which I will read in the version you send via
email, meaning that you do not have to describe the page only analyze it.
You should also cite other websites in the introduction and elsewhere to develop
your analyses of the website you are reviewing. I will assess your review
by how well you have applied the design and evaluation criteria as well as by
how well you develop your analyses themselves.
- 3/8 revision is more than editing
- class meets in CCIT 311
- In groups, you will discuss the essay that you chose to revise
for this assignment. With your cover memo as the point of departure, your collaborators will give you additional feedback on the responses that
they posted to the Caucus site. Then, in the second half of class, we will discuss
the reading from Williams's book on style, the revision
materials on the Resources page, and the ways that they can help you
improve your revision strategies.
-
- Assignments for class:
- Post the essay you have selected to revise and a cover memo to the Caucus site by
Tuesday, March 6 at 5:00. The cover memo should include
three paragraphs: 1) an outline of the context for which you wrote this
essay, including the course, the assignment, and the criticism and
commentary that you received (if the essay comes from this class, then you
should still summarize what your peer editors and I noted on the
essay); 2) a summary of your plans for the revision, including
comments on your plans for revising the overall development, your
assessment of the paragraphs that need work, and at least two aspects of
your style that you want to work on; and 3) several specific question
about your writing that you would like your peer respondents to comment
upon.
-
- Write reviews of the drafts posted by the members of your team by
Wednesday, 7:00 pm.
-
- Read pages 97-136 of Style, Ten Lessons in Clarity and
Grace, and come to class ready to discuss how it applies to your
writing. Be ready to talk about at least two aspects of your
style that you want to work on in this unit. After discussing the
issues in your group, we will review the highlights of your group's discussions
of editing, with the assigned reading as our point of departure.
-
-
- Review the materials
on revision included on our Resource page and be ready to talk about
your strengths and weaknesses working on revision at the paragraph and
essay levels. Using the materials on revision, we will
then discuss editing as a part of revision. Be ready to discuss at
least two specific revision strategies that you found useful in the
on-line materials and/or your own reading and work with revision.
- Review the Computer-Based
Tutorial website and decide upon one tutorial that you would like to begin
with. In class we will get oriented to the site and address questions
that you may have about how to get started on the tutorials. The Quick
Start page provides details on how to get started with the Computer-Based
Tutorials.
-
-
- 3/22 improving your syntax
- class meets in ML 313
- Continuing our discussions of revision and editing, we will
review readings from Williams's book and an article by Maxine Hairston, "Not All Errors Are Created Equal," which reports on a
survey of college graduates' assessments of the most serious grammatical
errors. Using Williams's appendices on grammar and punctuation and
related materials from the Resource page, we will discuss the syntactic
problems that you discovered when you reviewed the papers that you and your
collaborators have written.
-
- Assignments for class:
- Send your paper to me as an attachment to email before class and
bring a hard copy to class in a folder with previous essays, including
those that you have submitted this semester, and essays from other classes
that seem relevant for this assignment.
-
- Read pages 139-190 of Williams's Style.
-
- Review the papers you have written in this and other classes,
and come to class with at least two examples of constructions and punctuation
that you are unsure of the "rules" for, two examples of awkward
constructions or stylistic infelicities that you have tended to use, and two
other stylistic patterns that you commonly use that you think work
well.
-
(Draft for revision with cover memo due 3/6 to Caucus, revision due
3/22)
- Post your cover memo and the essay that you will revise to our Caucus
site.
- Send the revision to me as an attachment via
email before class and bring a hard copy to class along with a folder
containing your previous essays.
-
-
In this unit, you will revise an essay that you have already
written. You should choose an essay that needs work and shows promise, not
one that merely needs editing. The unit focuses on revision and editing,
and I will assess your revision against how effectively you have integrated our
work into your writing, not simply according to the quality of the essay
itself. To do so, I will consider how much improvement you made with the
revision and whether you have addressed the concerns that I and others have
noted on previous essays and drafts, including how well you have learned to
rethink the overall development of the essay, to tighten and develop paragraphs,
and improve your style and eliminate problems with mechanics.
- The criteria that I will use to evaluate the essay:
- 1. The essay should lay out a well-defined approach, including a
thesis sentence if appropriate, in the introduction.
- 2. The body of the essay should develop a unified line of analysis
that is marked by logical connections among the paragraphs.
- 3. The conclusion should summarize or synthesize the analysis and
may note additional implications.
- 4. The paragraphs should have clearly defined topics developed in
topical strings that build from old to new information and are supported
with relevant and clearly related specifics.
- 5. The sentences should be largely free of problems with
punctuations and grammar, and the sentences should generally follow the
principles of style that we are studying, including using active verbs and
putting the major agents in the subject slots.
-
3/29 web authoring workshop
Class meets in CCIT 311.
We will work on using Netscape Composer to create web
pages. You should have completed the Computer-Based Tutorial on
Netscape Composer or otherwise learned the basics of Netscape Composer or a
comparable web authoring program before class. If you have problems,
please contact me via email.
Various options for how to learn Netscape Composer are included on the computer
section of the Resources web page. We will work together in class to
create a web page on frequently asked questions for English majors, so please
come to class with three questions that you think English majors would benefit
from having answers to and a draft of an answer (a couple of sentences or short
paragraph). We will use this material to begin creating a web page.
Assignments for class:
Come to class with three questions that you think English
majors would like to have answered, and draft out a short answer to each. We
will use the questions and answers to work together toward creating a Frequently
Asked Questions web page for English majors at the University of Arizona.
Complete at least two Computer-Based Tutorials, attend a
workshop on Netscape, or invest several hours in learning Netscape Composer or a
similar web authoring program. The computer
section of the resource page provides information on free workshops, open
access computer labs, the CBTs, and other on-line tutorials on Netscape
composer.
4/5 web authoring workshop and introduction to
searching for jobs
Class meets in CCIT 311.
We will continue our collaborate work on developing websites
using Netscape Composer, with a web page on Frequently Asked Questions providing
us with a project to work on together. You may work on your own web page
or on this collaborative project. We will also discuss your research on
job trends and review some of the strategies and documents involved in job
searches.
Complete at least two other Computer-Based Tutorials on
composing web pages or other computer applications such as advanced word
processing. If you do not find the CBTs to be accessible or useful,
then you can use other resources, but spend several hours working on upgrading
your familiarity with basic computer software.
Review the materials on finding jobs from the course Resource
page.
Major Assignment for Unit 5
(Bring drafts of the memo, letter and resume to class on 4/12,
revisions are due to me on 4/19)
You will write a memo reporting on your job research, a letter
of application for a particular job, and a resume.
In a one-page single-spaced memo, you will report your research
on available jobs and related trends in a particular market, using the on-line
sources in the Resource page and other sources such as local web pages or
publications. The memo should report on the types of jobs that are
available (in a particular city or area if that is how you are searching), how
the jobs are characterized, what qualifications are needed, and what resources
you are using to prepare to apply for the jobs (you should have at least three
sources that you have studied, for example, websites or publications on a
particular organization, general trends in the field of employment, or resources
on how to find and secure jobs in the field). The memo will be
evaluated by the quality of the writing, the depth and thoughtfulness of the
research, and the effectiveness of your analysis of the field of employment and
the points that a job seeker such as yourself needs to consider in securing a
job in the field.
Your application letter should be oriented to a specific
job. To write this letter, you will have to conduct a personal inventory
using the relevant materials on the Resource page. The letter should
relate your relevant experience, expertise and goals to the requirements of the
job and the needs of the organization. Your letter will be evaluated by
the effectiveness of the writing, your characterizations of your major
strengths, your use of pointed specifics to demonstrate your strengths, and your
identification of your strengths with the needs of the organization.
The personal inventory process will also be important in
generating specifics for the resume on what you have done, can do and will
do. We will work with strategies and models in class. Your resume
will be evaluated on its effective use of specific details, clear and appealing
format, and careful editing.
Extra Credit Assignment
If you wish to earn up to 5 extra points (which would be
equivalent to an improvement of one half letter grade for the final course
grade), you may write the longer researched paper that was originally envisioned
for this unit rather than a one-page memo. The paper should be about five
pages and should include at least five sources providing research on employment
trends, opportunities and qualifications in the area. If you prefer, you
may also write on more general issues in the field. Please contact me in
advance if you wish to write an extra credit paper.
