College English I  1

About the course. College English I, a requirement of most majors, is designed to develop students’ skills in critical reading and a range of writing tasks. University-level work requires sophisticated approaches to reading, so that you go beyond matters of comprehension and summary to evaluate and extend everything you read—not just chapters of textbooks but imaginative literature, newspaper articles, and a range of cultural texts.

You may think that writing well at this level means answering an instructor’s question with an introduction, body, and conclusion and using correct punctuation and mechanics. But the greatest challenges you’ll face as a writer are discovering something meaningful to say and using your writing to participate in conversations about a subject. In every academic major and in the professional worlds beyond college, your success will depend in part on your ability to approach a topic with complexity and creativity, to gather and evaluate information, to organize your ideas effectively, to write coherent sentences and paragraphs, and to revise drafts. Although courses through your undergraduate career will continue to develop these skills, College English I should be a sound foundation on which to build.

The primary text, Donald McQuade and Christine McQuade’s Seeing & Writing, emphasizes several principles that will guide this course. One is that your writing will improve when your perception improves, when you notice details and formulate questions and answers about what you see. This is true whether you are examining an essay, a photograph, a television program, or a textbook. Another principle is that your writing will improve when you become more reflective, when you consider who constructed a text, when you think about audience and purpose, when you reflect on how your own background and identity affect both what and how you see. We will therefore devote considerable attention to both visual and verbal literacy, to the ways that our own culture uses texts and images to construct identity and persuade, and to the range of responses any text provokes.

The secondary text, Leonard J. Rosen’s Decisions: A Writer’s Handbook, is included to give us continued practice with mechanics of writing and to serve as a resource as we edit drafts.

Several other assumptions also underlie the course design: good writing is the result of sound, informed thinking based on reading and observation; good writing is the result of a recursive, reflective process; good writing builds on sequences of increasing complexity. I assume you have important things to say, and I am eager to hear and read your words. I see my role as helping you articulate these thoughts as clearly and persuasively as possible.

Course goals. The broad goals of this course are to develop critical reading and thinking abilities; to develop analytical writing abilities and a practical knowledge of composing strategies; to develop editing abilities, in terms of evaluating both one’s own and others’ prose; to use available technology in the production of written texts. More specific skills the course seeks to develop include these:

Writing: generating ideas, drafting, revising, editing, developing and sustaining one’s own voice in writing, producing papers that conform to academic conventions and the guidelines of the Modern Language Association, producing texts with visual appeal for a general audience

Reading: understanding reading as a complex process, understanding “texts” in broad ways, identifying the central ideas of a text, identifying the structure of a text, distinguishing facts from assertions, considering works in context, reflecting on audience and purpose of a text

Critical thinking: comparing ideas, summarizing and paraphrasing a text, analyzing and evaluating ideas in a text, framing an argument, synthesizing several points of view, anticipating readers’ responses to a text, understanding how differences in culture and identity affect one’s reading of a text.

These goals will be met through a variety of course projects, assignments, and experiences.

Required texts. These texts have been ordered at the Stark Campus bookstore:

In addition, each student will need a dictionary, notebook, folder for handouts, and computer disk.

Class sessions. Our class sessions will consist primarily of discussion of the assigned reading and writing for each day, sometimes in small groups and sometimes with the class as a whole. Occasionally, we will meet in the library or computer lab, and some of our class time may be spent on short, informal writing exercises. Your participation is essential.

Reading assignments. The syllabus lists reading assignments for each day the course meets. You are expected to have read all of the assigned pages before coming to class. Such preparation includes not only skimming the material for a general understanding of its content, but careful reading and annotating and independent analysis. If the assignment includes a visual text, plan to spend more time with it than a simple glance at the images there. Questions distributed in class should help you understand the expected level of preparation.

Quizzes. We will have occasional quizzes, based on the assigned reading, a take-home assignment, or principles of grammar, punctuation, and mechanics assigned in Decisions. These may be announced, but they will often be unannounced. They cannot be made up; the lowest two grades will be dropped.

Writing assignments. The English Department requirement for this course is that you produce at least 4,500 words of graded writing (roughly, 16-18 typed, double-spaced pages). In addition to a number of short assignments outlined on the syllabus, you will write four essays: a detailed observation about a place and its meaning; an analysis of an image or group of images; a comparison of the ways gender or race are treated in two texts; and an persuasive argument that uses two critical perspectives to interpret an image or short text. These essays build on the reading assignments in Seeing & Writing, and they become increasingly complex as the semester progresses. Revisions are expected, and the grade for each assignment will be based on the final draft.

Academic honesty. Plagiarism, the undocumented “borrowing” of another person’s words,ideas, or patterns of organization, is a serious academic offense. The Internet may give you more opportunities to lift text from other sources, but remember that your instructor has easy access to the same sources, including software that matches your text with another. Consistent with University policy, students who plagiarize may receive a grade of “F” for that work or for the entire course, depending on the extent of the offense.

Students with disabilities. In accordance with University policy, if you have a documented disability and require accommodations to obtain equal access in this course, please talk with the instructor at the beginning of the semester or as soon as you are given an assignment for which an accommodation is required. Students with disabilities must verify their eligibility through Ms. Kelly Oster in the Student Services Office (Main Hall 134). Ms. Oster can be reached by telephone at 499-9600 x.53287.

Service-learning option. If you are interested in earning another credit hour for this course by engaging in related service-learning, please see the instructor in the first week of class. This would mean identifying and carrying out appropriate community service to complement this course. You would need to register for the service-learning course and to meet a required number of service hours for the semester. To earn the one-hour credit, you would also complete a writing assignment related to your community service.

Office hours. The instructor will be available in Main Hall 445 at these times without an appointment:

Mondays7:45 – 8:45 and 1:00 – 1:45

Tuesdays1:00 – 3:15

Wednesdays 7:45 – 8:45 and 1:00 – 1:45

Fridays7:45 – 8:45

Electronic office hours (for those who have America Online) will be announced in class. If you need to see the instructor at another time, make an appointment. Evening hours are also available if necessary.

Communication with the instructor. Regular communication with the instructor is encouraged, especially as you work on assignments. You do not need to call to report absences, but do call or write if you have questions about your work or something covered in a class that you miss.

Phone. During office hours, you may call directly at 499-9600/x. 53445 (from the Canton area) or 535-3377/x. 53445 (from the Akron area). You are also welcome to call me at home (678-2787).

Voice mail. You can leave voice mail messages at the campus twenty-four hours a day; I check for messages frequently. My home phone also has an answering machine, perhaps more reliable than the humans there.

Fax. Fax messages, with the instructor’s name clearly marked, can be sent to the campus at 494-6121 or to my home number (678-2787).

E-mail. You can leave messages on campus e-mail () or home e-mail (). It’s probably a good idea to send any message to both places if you are hoping for the fastest response.

Final grade. The final grade in this course will be determined by this scale:

Essay 1100A = 900 – 1000

Essay 2150B = 800 – 899

Essay 3200C = 700 – 799

Essay 4250D = 600 – 699

Informal writing100F = below 600

Quizzes100

Group presentation 50

Final essay 50

TOTAL 1000