ENGLISH 131: WRITING EXPERIENCE WN 2006 Syd Thomas Office: Walker Hall 240Telephone: (517) 796-8520 and Hillsdale Ext: 437-3343E-mail: [email protected] HoursMonday & Wednesday: 9:30am—11:00am; 1:00pm –2:00pm (Hillsdale); Tuesday: 11:00am—1:00pm; 4:00pm – 6:00pm (Main Campus); And by AppointmentClassrooms: 6:00-7:25: RM BW205; 7:30-8:55: BW 108.Required Text: The St. Martin’s Guide to Writing, 7th Edition Course Goals This reading- and writing-intensive course is aimed at helping you develop writing skills necessary for your academic and professional success. You will come to feel competent and comfortable as writers as we come to understand writing as a process. By reading, responding, researching, writing, revising, editing and critiquing, you will gain practice at thinking critically and writing clearly. READING: Essentially we have two texts for this class: the first listed aboveand the second is the writings we ourselves produce. WRITING: There are two things that can help to make a person a good writer: 1) WRITE A LOT. And I forget what the second one is, so pay attention to the first. By the end of the semester then you will understand much more clearly how you write and how you write best, how to recognize good writing, and how to produce successful writing. You will be a better, more critical reader, one who can use this knowledge to act independently. Ultimately,I hope you will feel the power of your own voice and will see the necessity of and delight in clear,interesting prose. Additionally, JCC has established Associate Degree Outcomes (ADO) that courses must satisfy. These ADO are probably easiest thought of as abilities or skills and understandings. This course satisfies a number of these ADO including the following:ADO1a, the ability to communicate clearly, concisely, and intelligibly using writing skills;ADO2, the ability to comprehend and use information including written and oral forms;ADO5, the ability to work productively with others;ADO7, facility in the use of computers and other technologies appropriate to the program of study.A Few Thoughts about the Class and the Writing ProcessOne of the first tasks of a writer is to collect more information than he or she feels is necessary.Without this information it is very difficult to produce a successful piece of writing. This semester, then, you will be writing prolifically early in the semester, composing many pieces of prose which you will store in the “Writer’s Notebook”—writings held on your computer and in a paper notebook. Some of these pieces you will never finish, some you’ll polish numerous times—and that’s the nature of the writing process. Some you’ll share with the class and some will remain yours alone—though I will expect to be able to see these. Writers constantly produce falsestarts, dead ends, failures, until a piece of writing just seems to come together after a lot of hard work. Because writing is very rarely a solitary activity, you will be collaborating throughout this semester with each other and me as you struggle to learn how to write well. Our Roles as Teacher and StudentI view my role as your teacher to read your essay ideas (and eventually drafts) and make suggestions about what forms, what audiences and purposes, make most sense for the type of writing you are doing. Your role is to become personally involved with your writing and committed to your writing process, which is unique to you. The trick to making this class work for you is to discover what process works best for you as a writer. I'll be reading and responding to many of the things you'll be so busy scribbling, jotting, writing.GradesYour grade will be based on three areas:1. Portfolio* 35%2. 3 mini portfolios—drafts and finished papers** 45%3. Writing Assistance Credits*** 10% 4. Participation/Writer’s Notebook**** 10%*The Portfolio, quite simply, is a collection of your best work of at least 10 pages of typed (keyboarded) double-spaced non-fiction prose. Your portfolio (the final versions of the three major papers) must be turned into me no later than April 27, 2006. I will explain more about this assignment as the semester progresses and will post the grading criteria used by teachers at the end of the semester to evaluate your portfolio. Remember, the portfolio is the end result of all the work we will do during the semester.**The Drafting Process GradingYou will be graded on the quality of your essay as well as the hard work you put into them. Each essay will be worth 15 points. Five points will be assigned for the quality of the writing; five points can be earned for your process on the specific paper itself and five points for ‘support’/misc. writings-- responses to other students’ drafts. ***Guided Practice and Workshop Hours (GPAW)Students must complete a total of sixteen hours of additional writing work outside of classroom time. No more than eight hours may be accumulated after midterm. These hours include workshop attendance, tutorial work in the Center for Student Success, and other personalized writing instruction approved by me. I will assist you in making choices to improve your writing experiences and skills. The Writing Assistance report outlines many options for meeting this requirement. Complete the lab time, remembering to get appropriate signatures, and return the form to me. These hours are required. More information on this will be given in Week 2.****Process / ParticipationIn order to do well in this class you must participate. You will be asked to do so in two ways: 1) submitting your writings, 2) reading the text and participating in group workshops.Group Workshop Guidelines – (Please read carefully)The Writing Workshop—Adapted from MIT OpenCourseWare The writing workshop, as another writing teacher has called it, is "a communal conversation" among the members of a writing group about a piece of writing-in-progress done by one of the writers in the group. I like the phrase "communal conversation," so I've borrowed it for our use. To describe the workshop in that way highlights that all of us participate actively in that conversation, stresses that each one of us is responsible for reading the text in question with an open mind, reading it carefully and with our full attention, and then for contributing our perceptions, insights, and visions of the piece, what we see as its strengths, where we think it is going or could go, and
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