408 Placid Hall
Hours: MW 9:30-10:20, 12:15-1:30; Tues. 3:45-5:00 pm.
Phone: x2150
email: wclough@email.stvincent.edu
Gaining new knowledge is only one part of your overall learning experience in college; refining, reshaping and reorienting this new knowledge, as well as information and opinions you already have, is also important. This Language and Rhetoric class is therefore intended to help you become not only a better writer, but also a better thinker.
As a college student, you will be expected to take full initiative in uncovering questions as well as answers, in reclaiming old ideas as well as inventing new ones, in exploring who you are becoming as well as who you have been. You will have the opportunity to do all of this through several formats, outlined below. In this class we will approach the task of writing as a process in which your work will be improved through several drafts of essays under the supervision of myself and tutors, as well as with groups of other students in this class. I expect you to work with real ideas and to solve real problems rather than write essays just to manufacture an academic product. You will learn fundamental strategies that apply to many kinds of writing assignments you are likely to encounter in college. Thus the overall design of Language and Rhetoric is to familiarize you with what it means to be a responsible thinker and clear writer in any discipline, throughout college as well as in the years that follow.
Some teachers from fields of study other than English have met in special summer seminars and have considered how students may learn to write better in the majors offered by the college. These teachers acknowledge that different disciplines value different kinds of styles and content, but these professors believe that any piece of good writing possesses these six principles: Purpose, Organization, Insight, Coherence, Support and Clarity. In Language and Rhetoric you will become familiar with how these principles combine to yield effective essays and journal entries. In your other courses you should apply these principles as you write lab reports, abstracts, proposals, memos and letters, research papers, journals, in-class essays, case studies, and whatever other kind of writing a specific field may require.
Even professional writers do not sit at a desk to begin a piece of writing, start at the upper left of a blank page, and fill the sheet to the bottom as words flow with little effort from left to right, line below line. "Easy writing is cursed hard reading," Mark Twain once said, and often ease of effort on the writer's part means struggle on the reader's part. Even the best of writers have to cross out sentences, delete whole paragraphs, and sometimes begin all over. Without this process of revising for the reader's needs and questions, an essay will not succeed in informing, convincing or moving the audience, which is the chief purpose of most essays.
Of course, to revise effectively, you must know something about your subject-matter; and you must decide when, where, and what changes are necessary. This course will provide you with the skills to do both by creating an environment where your investigation of topics may follow your own interests and experiences, and by facilitating the creation, manipulation and editing of text through use of the word processor. Thus all of your essays in this class should be explorations of ideas that are important to you, assigned in general terms so that there is plenty of room for personalizing and adapting. Also, all essays should emerge from a word-processing program, so that when instructor, tutor or work group advises a change in text, you will be able to recast ideas immediately and fluently.
In this class you will write four essays of various lengths and following various formats, all of which will be specified on the individual assignment sheets. They are all to be done on the Mac computers. Please have them ready on the due dates specified below; a single late assignment will cause you to fall behind in your own work here, and me to fall behind in my corrections and in the help I can give you. My usual practice is to penalize late work one letter grade for each class day it is late, unless you have a sufficient excuse for lateness (I should add that I am the final judge of what constitutes "a sufficient excuse").
Your journal is the best place to question, observe, perceive and analyze. It is a laboratory or workshop where the direction your mind takes and the strength it gains are almost entirely up to you. It is an exercise in which you are your own teacher. Choosing what to write about, and the way to write about it, should encourage and yield more effective thinking and expression. The journal is a chance to explore, to focus on the things that are important to you. Although you will occasionally be given specific journal assignments, you will usually be left free to write about whatever you wish. Journal entries may vary widely in topic, structure, length and tone. Such variety is desirable; because people are all different, all journals should be unique.
Language and Rhetoric requires a journal because, like skiing, cooking or playing the saxophone, writing is a skill which requires constant practice. You may use your journal to write out ideas related to the essay assignments or to try new approaches to writing; you may engage in some creative writing, like short stories or poetry; you may "blow off steam" in some entries, using your journal to express your frustrations--you should have plenty of topics to write about. Not a week should pass without your writing at least three one-page entries in your journal; and if you have not been given a specific assignment, these entries may be about anything you wish. And because a journal should be a place for experimentation, it may be submitted in imperfect form, including cross-outs and marginalia, even drawings and doodles; in the journal I will be looking for originality and a willingness to experiment, rather than for a finished product.
In this class, I strongly urge you to keep your journal in a special notebook which you use specifically for that purpose, and to handwrite your entries. Although our essays themselves will be written on the computers, I believe that the physical act of writing has a real value. This is not a requirement; you may, if you wish, keep your journal in its own "folder" within the Microsoft Word Processing Program. But I strongly urge you to handwrite your journal.
You are required to keep all of your work, word-processed as well as handwritten, in your own folder or portfolio. This kind of documentation has several advantages: it will allow you and me to track your progress as a writer; it will allow you the opportunity to change older pieces of writing as your skills and opinions evolve; it will also allow you to practice the specific kind of writing demanded by your major, and, once the course is over, it may be a source of models and ideas for other classes.
Your portfolio should consist of your essay "folder" in Microsoft Word, as well as hardcopy of exercises and group work that you have done in this class. Be sure to claim each document in your portfolio by signing it and by indicating what assignment you are fulfilling. At the end of the semester you must turn in this folder to me with all graded work (quizzes, tests, final copies of essays, etc.) so that I may get a sense of the overall progress of your work; this will help me in determining your final grade.
This course will take place in two classrooms--Alfred 3B and Placid 424. The first room is designed for lecturing and group work; the second is a Macintosh Lab in which each student will have access to a computer terminal. In the Mac Lab my role is as guide and facilitator for student writing and revising. In all sections of Language and Rhetoric, students will have individual conferences with the instructor, do group work in the classroom and in the lab, and have access to a tutor trained to help students become familiar with Macintosh word processing.
It is not my practice to give in-class mid-terms or finals in this class, and I have no plans to do so this semester. I will, however, give periodic quizzes on the readings, on points of grammar, and on any material we cover in class. Some of these quizzes will be announced in advance, some will not be, so you should come to every class expecting to be quizzed on the assignment. Quizzes cannot normally be made up. So you will receive a zero for any quiz you miss unless you have a sufficient excuse. I will also give occasional homework assignments, and your performance on all of this will form a part of your grade in this course.
It may be necessary for us to meet during finals week--not for an in-class final, but to tie up unfinished business or the like. I will give more details on this sometime after Easter.
The four essays will carry most of the weight in the determination of your final grade, but remember that the process of reaching an essay in final form may be taken into consideration. Remember, too, that you will be handing in your portfolio near the end of the semester, and that I will be examining your performance globally as I determine your grade. This means that your journal, quizzes, and homework also play an important part in your grade.
Your grade will be determined according to the following scale:
Please be regular in attendance. Every class we will be covering important material, and nearly every class we will be working on the computers. So if you miss even a single class, you may miss something important and helpful. My usual policy is to allow two unexcused cuts--that is, one week's worth of classes--before your absences affect your grade; however, I reserve the right to allow you even less if I feel that you need the work. Should you find it necessary to be absent for a class, please let me know--ahead of time if possible. If you are absent and do not see me, then your absence is unexcused.
Please be on time for each class, and please remain until dismissed. If you have a problem arriving on time, or if you must leave early, please let me know. Any combination of three late arrivals or early departures equals one unexcused absence.
If you are having a problem of any kind, please let me know. Don't stay away out of shyness or fear. If I don't know that a problem exists, I can't help you.
Aug. 26: Preview of course: evaluation questionnaire. WM v-vii, 149-55. The MAC Lab Handbook
Aug. 28: The Writing Process. Prewriting . WM 1-38; WR 3-7, 9-11, 32-34.
Sept. 2: Thesis statements and introductory paragraphs. WM 98-110; WR 11-14.
Sept. 4: Student journals. Writing a critical summary. WM 94, 125-28.
Sept. 9: Drafting. WM 38-44; WR 14, 15-17
Sept. 11: First draft of essay I due.
Sept. 16: Student conferences on essay I.
Sept. 18:
Sept. 23: Revising. WM 60-82, 193-96; WR 29-32.
Sept. 25: Revision of theme I due. The body of the essay. WM 83-92.
Sept. 30: The narrative essay. WM 95, 137-43; WR 18-19.
Oct. 2: The narrative essay continued.
Oct. 7: Overall organization of the essay; paragraph structure.WM 44-60; WR 28-29.
Oct. 9: Paragraph structure continued.
Oct. 14: Extended weekend. No class.
Oct. 16: Wording. WR 87-118.
Oct. 21: Coherence. WR 23-28.
Oct. 23: Essay II due. Coherence continued.
Oct. 28: The comparison/contrast essay. WM 128-37.
Oct. 30: Comparison/contrast continued.
Nov. 4: Peer editing of essay III.
Nov. 6: Draft work on essay III.
Nov. 11: Draft work on essay III.
Nov. 13: Essay III due.
Nov. 18: Cause and effect.WM 144-47.
Nov. 20: Argumentation.
Nov. 25: Peer editing of essay IV.
Nov. 27: Thanksgiving Day. No class meeting.
Dec. 2: Draft work on essay IV.
Dec. 4: Review of course. Evaluations. Draft work on essay IV.
Dec. 11, 11:00-1:00: Final exam period. Essay IV due.
This schedule is ultimately subject to change, since no semester is totally predictable. It may become necessary, for example, to spend more class time on certain aspects of writing--for example, the thesis statement--than I have allotted. I therefore reserve the right to rearrange the syllabus as I see fit, should I see the need. Of course, I will give adequate notice of any such changes. But barring such notice, we will follow this schedule.
Throughout the semester I will be passing out sample essays that illustrate certain aspects of writing. You are, of course, responsible for the material contained in these or any other handouts I may give.
Again, if you are having problems of any kind, feel free to come to me to talk them over. Don't stay away out of shyness or fear.