ENGLISH 098: DEVELOPMENTAL WRITING – Fall 2008 Class #: 12915 Instructor: Nicole Warwick Day/Classroom/Time: MWF/SH307/8 am Email: [email protected] Office: ST 507 (818) 677-5280 Website: www.csun.edu/~nlw9004/098 Office Hours: M 10 am-12 pm and by appt. LRC: 677-2033 REQUIRED TEXTS MATERIALS Everyday Writer, Lunsford 1 two-pocket folder Everyday Use 2nd edition, Roskelly and Jolliffe a spiral notebook No Country for Old Men, McCarthy 2 blue books New Voices, 18th edition CSUN email account GENERAL AIMS OF THE COURSE: English 098 is a semester long pre-baccalaureate course for students who score 142-150 on the California State University English Placement Test Composition or receive credit in English 097. While both developmental courses English 097 and 098 stress reading and writing, English 098 is designed primarily to improve students’ abilities to write in the kinds of genres they will use in their academic careers and beyond. The course should give students many opportunities to write in ways that challenge them; they should also have many opportunities to discuss their writing with peer groups, and with the class as a whole. STUDENT LEARNING OUTCOMES FOR THIS COURSE:  Students will demonstrate competence in the recursive writing process, using strategies for invention, drafting, and revision.  Students will demonstrate their understanding that writing in an academic context means exploring a subject, distinguishing their own ideas from the ideas of others, and organizing information around a central focus. Students will demonstrate developing facility in various genres of writing, including timed writing, personal writing, journal writing, text-based writing, and argument, developing rhetorical strategies appropriate to audience and purpose.  Students will demonstrate their knowledge of critical reading strategies and apply them to both print and visual texts.  Students will demonstrate developing competency in organizational patterns, sentence structure, and the basic usage and mechanical practices of Edited American English.  Students will demonstrate their developing understanding of how to use writing and reading as a means of participating in the world around them. SEMESTER OVERVIEW: During the semester, you will write three substantive papers of 3-4 pages, developed through multiple drafts, revisions, in-class essays, journal entries, and conversation. The writing projects you will work on will grow out of reading assignments and class discussions and will be reasonably challenging, aimed at developing intellectual maturity by encouraging a critical awareness of yourself, your values, and your multicultural environment. Although all work in the course will be reviewed, not every assignment will be formally evaluated. Working in small groups will be a core component of our class, and this is one of the first tasks of the semester: establishing our small groups. By learning to collaborate in small groups we will create the opportunity to listen to, learn from, and teach each other. However, working in small groups does not always come easy; we have to learn how to work together in order to make our small groups a success. The reward will be well worth the hard work: What we produce through our work in small groups will create the knowledge base for the course and will allow each student to shape the class and our learning community.In the first part of the semester we will learn about key concepts in writing, concepts that have been written about since Plato and Aristotle. These concepts will foster an awareness of your own writing, will improve your critical reading skills, and will improve your ability to evaluate the writing of others. The first writing assignment, in fact, will ask you to evaluate one of two short pieces we will begin reading in Week 2. This first writing project will be due at the end of Week 5. In the second part of the semester, we will turn our attention to the novel No Country for Old Men. Analyzing and writing about this novel will give us the opportunity to apply the concepts we learned about in the first section and will also give us an opportunity to add to our growing understanding of writing. This project will be due at the beginning of Week 10. Finally, in the last writing project, we will explore more closely our relationships with reading and writing, and we will also focus on how to successfully conduct and incorporate outside research into a paper. In this final project, you will be asked to think about what you have learned about reading and writing over the course of the semester as you reflect on your own literacy history and research the literacy histories of others. This project will be due at the end of Week 13. At the end of the semester, you will put together a portfolio of your work which will be evaluated by other 098 instructors. Putting the portfolio together will allow you to see how the writing process – inventing, drafting, revising, editing – has been actualized in your own writing. You will see how you have responded to the needs of your audience by producing papers which provide clear introductions and sufficient detail. You will also see how your writing has grown from participating in your small group and the learning community we have created through the sharing of our knowledge and understandings. The preface you write for your portfolio will allow you to reflect on your growth over the course of the semester and examine the experiences that contributed to that growth. PASSING THE CLASS English 098 is a Credit/No Credit course. Receiving CREDIT in English 098 will require the following:  Maintaining a C average  Turning in all 3 major writing projects  Submitting and passing the final portfolio GRADING  60% of your grade will be based on 1000 points worth of work which will be evaluated on a credit/no credit basis. If you meet the minimum requirements, you receive full credit. If you don’t meet the minimum requirements, you don’t receive credit.  40% will be based on your participation in the class and in your groups. This will be graded. An “A” will earn you 100 points, a “B” 85 points, a “C” 75 points, and a “D” 65 points. An “F” will not receive any credit. o Individual participation will be evaluated on the quality of your participation in class and completing journal, texting the text and