English 102: Some Things to Know
Instructor: Tom Versteeg
Office: Building 24, Room 338
Phone: 533-4182
Email Address:
Course Website: Here’s a handy tool to check on assignments, announcements, and other course info from anywhere you have access to the internet. Simply go to SFCC’s home page, hold your cursor over the Student Resources tab at the top of the page, and click on the Faculty Websites option. You’ll find the Faculty Websites organized by instructor’s last name, so you’ll want to go to “V” to find the one for this class. Not only will our Website provide you access to copies of almost all important documents for our class (like the very course information you’re reading now, as well as all assignments, peer conference forms, models and examples, etc.) whenever you need it, but once class gets rolling, you’ll want to be sure and check the Announcements page several times per week to get up-to-the-minute updates and other important class info.ere’s a handy tool to chwekc
Be careful, though; I have a Faculty Website for about half a dozen different courses, so be sure to choose “Versteeg, Tom - Advanced Composition 102” to get the low-down for this class. Important note: this is not Canvas.
Texts: Bullock, The Little Seagull Handbook, Second Edition
This Course: Welcome to English 102. This class is designed to help you become a more effective thinker, writer, and researcher within the context of the academic discourse community. You’ll gain a fuller understanding of the kinds of issues and ways of thinking that are valued in the academic community, of what counts as convincing evidence in that community, of how coherence, clarity, fluency, and intellectual honesty are defined in the academic context, of how, basically, to most effectively join the ongoing conversations of the academic community. By and large, you’ll acquire this understanding by engaging in exactly the sort of activity most common to members of the academic community: you’ll attend carefully to various kinds of texts and then in various ways respond to those texts with texts of your own; you’ll practice reading an assortment of texts on issues of concern to an academic audience, clarifying your understanding of those texts by means of summary writing, responding to those texts as an active, critical reader, and creating a thoughtful, convincing, well-researched argument of your own. For more information on the kinds of texts you’ll be creating and on their evaluation, see “English 102 Essay Guidelines” and “English 102: Essay Assessment Standards” below.
Attendance: Important in-class group learning activities (actually, they may occasionally be individual
activities) will be a fairly regular feature of this course. Moreover, since our class is founded on the notion of guided practice—of actually doing the activity one wants to improve at (in this case, reading and writing academic texts) in consultation and collaboration with others who are engaged in the same activity, including at least one collaborator with more advanced experience regarding that activity (in this case, that would be me)—even when the class shifts primarily into workshop mode, your attendance will be essential; if you don’t show up, you won’t be able to complete the fundamental tasks of the class—composing your own work, conferring with me on that work, conferring with other class members on that work, and assisting your classmates with their work. Thus, attendance is a course requirement. If, for whatever reasons, you miss more than 20% of the class (let’s say 11 class sessions—over two weeks of class—in the ten and a half week quarter), you’ll be ineligible for a final grade higher than 1.9. On the other hand, if you miss no more than one class all quarter, you’ll have an extra .1 added to your final grade.
Plagiarism: Plagiarism is the deliberate or accidental presentation of another’s ideas or words as your own. If you copy a sentence from a book, magazine, or online source and pass it off as your own; if you summarize or paraphrase someone else’s ideas without acknowledging your debt; or if you purchase or download a paper to hand in as your own, you have plagiarized deliberately. If you carelessly omit quotation marks or forget to mention the source of ideas that aren’t your own, you have plagiarized accidentally. Either way, plagiarism is a serious violation of academic ethics. The mildest penalty you can expect for such a violation is failure of the paper in question. Repeated violations will result in failure of the course.
Seminars: Three times during the quarter, all by roughly the quarter’s half-way mark, the class will engage in full-fledged seminars. Seminars are organized class conversations which students prepare for in advance. In seminar you’ll be completely responsible for your own learning and for facilitating the learning of other members of the group. Each seminar will be based on a primary text reading I’ll assign beforehand; these readings will each have some connection to one of the major class themes you’ll be working with, and at least one just might end up serving as a source for your researched argument. You’ll be expected to arrive at seminar with both an annotated copy of the reading and a seminar paper in hand; seminar papers needn’t be as polished or as lengthy as any essay assignment—hey, they needn’t even look like an essay—but the ideas you come up with for seminar papers might well end up finding a place in one of those essay assignments. The annotated readings and sem papers serve both as “tickets” to the seminar—that is, you can’t attend seminar if you don’t arrive with an annotated copy of the reading and a seminar paper—and as springboards into the seminar discussion. Before long, we’ll talk a good deal more about the nature and evaluation of seminars. For the moment, though, you should understand that each excellent seminar performance can add .1 of a grade point to your final grade and that each poor performance can subtract .1 of a point from that final grade.
Health and Disability Issues: If you have a health condition or disability that may require accommodations for you to participate fully in the course, please contact me before or after class. Also, if you haven’t done so already, you’d be wise to contact the college’s Disability Support Services office in Building 17 (room 201, phone 533-4166). Of course all information about disability will be regarded as confidential.
A Note on Respect: In order for learning to take place, students must feel safe; this safety is due all students, not only those who share your values, beliefs, and life experiences. For this reason, courtesy, thoughtfulness, and acceptance are essential in our discussions in and out of the classroom. Acceptance should not be confused with agreement; one need not agree with a person to listen, and one must listen well in order to disagree either cogently or respectfully. Every student in this course has a voice and so deserves the courtesy of attentive listening and the freedom to express diverse ideas.
Final Exam: There will be no final exam in this class. The deadline for submission of any and all work will be Thursday, 18 June.
How You Can Expect to Spend Your Time in This Class: If we reflect on our own experiences with learning, we can probably all agree that one of the best ways to learn new skills or increase our mastery of old ones is by means of concentrated time and practice involving the actual skill we want to improve at. This is generally the case whatever the skill in question, whether it’s shooting free throws, building furniture, or—as in this class—reading texts in an active, thoughtful way and responding to them with thoughtful, convincing texts (essays) of our own. And the best kind of practice is often guided practice—a situation in which as we practice we collaborate with and get feedback from others who are working to build their skills in the same area, including at least one collaborator who’s had a good deal more experience and practice with the skill in question than the other learners and can thus offer feedback from a more “advanced” perspective; in various settings, that “advanced” collaborator might be called a coach, a master craftsman, or—as in our class—a teacher (hey, that’s me). In any case, these notions of guided practice and collaboration are absolutely central to the learning environment in this class; they are the basic reasons the class is set up as it is and has the requirements it has, and while we’ll spend some portion of class time on more general learning activities designed to help you get a clearer, richer understanding of the readings and ideas you’ll be working with and the moves you’ll need to make in order to succeed with your writing and research, collaborative practice will be a fundamental in-class activity, increasingly so as the quarter progresses. This means you’ll spend a good deal of your class time in English 102 either working on your essays, conferring with me about the work you’ve done, or conferring with classmates about that work. More details about what we’ll be conferring on and how we’ll document those conferences can be found in “English 102 Essay Guidelines” below. But as you get comfortable with this class structure of collaborative practice, there are two extremely important points you should recognize:
§ While workshop time in class will provide you with the opportunity to get some of the work on your essays done, the great majority of that work will have to happen outside of class time; you should plan on doing at least 80% of your reading, researching, and writing for our class outside of class time.
§ Don’t put this work off; rather get started with your first summary/response right away and proceed full-speed-ahead from that moment forward. Procrastination is a sure recipe for disaster at quarter’s end.
English 102 Essay Guidelines
In this class you can plan on writing between one and three relatively brief summary/response essays as well as one relatively lengthy researched argument, all related in some way to one of three general themes: economic justice and opportunity, digital technology and its impacts on our lives and minds, and the natural environmental and its prospects. Of course your final drafts must be typed, double-spaced, on standard 8 1/2 x 11 inch paper. Be sure to leave an inch margin on all sides. Also, please use a font size of 12; this is large enough to assure easy reading even for decrepit old eyes such as mine yet small enough so it doesn’t look like you’re trying to produce text for a billboard. Moreover, all essays should follow MLA formatting guidelines (see 149-157 in The Little Seagull Handbook for an accurate model of how a standard MLA essay is set up).
You’ll be composing two different kinds of essays for this class, but the audience for both kinds will be members of the academic community—or, more specifically, academic types who might well have a general familiarity with the topic you’re writing about but who aren’t experts in that field and who haven’t read the specific article you may be treating. The two types of essays:
§ Summary/Response: In these essays you’ll both describe the arguments a published essay offers (in essence, you’ll articulate the essay’s fundamental point/points—that is, its thesis—and the structure of major supporting claims, details, and examples it offers to convince readers of its central point) and deliver various sorts of commentary on the essay and/or its arguments. A requirement for any successful summary/response is that the response portion include a rhetorical evaluation that involves both a meaningful consideration of how effectively the writer attends to skeptical readers and a meaty evaluation of the quality of either the essay’s evidence or its logic. Beyond this requirement, feel free in your response section to go wherever your active, critical reading takes you, perhaps offering other critiques of the essay itself, or explaining why you agree or disagree with one or more of the essay’s important ideas, or connecting material from the essay either to aspects of your own experience or to something else in the wider world. It’s likely that to be successful any summary/response will include somewhere between two and four richly developed body paragraphs of summary and another two to four rich body paragraphs of response, ideally with a graceful transition between summary and response; in terms of word count, you’re probably looking at somewhere between 1200 and 1600 words. You’ll have the option of completing as few as one summary/response successfully, or you can enhance your grade by completing two or all three summary/responses to class standards.
§ Researched Argument: For this essay, you’ll come up with a thesis of your own, one related to one of our three general themes—though not necessarily to the content of any specific reading you do for summary/response essays or seminars—and support that thesis not only with your own clear reasoning and insightful commentary, but also with researched material you’ve culled from at least six different sources; please note that at least one of your sources must be readily available in hardcopy format, though you might access that source electronically—via ProQuest, for instance. Moreover, all sources should be considered valid and credible by the academic readers you’re addressing, and all should be employed effectively. Of course your sources should be documented per MLA guidelines (in The Little Seagull Handbook see 109-157, and you can check out our library’s “Citing Resources APA, MLA & Avoiding Plagiarism” in the Subject & Class Guides as well). Also, as well as providing convincing evidence and explanations for your position, you—like any thoughtful member of the academic community—should take care to attend to the concerns of the at least mildly skeptical readers you’re writing to, both scrupulously qualifying your claims and providing a fair hearing for at least the most obvious and important objections that those who don’t agree with you might raise before finding ways to minimize or refute those objections (see “Thinking about What Your Reader Is Thinking” in the Documents section of our Course Website for some assistance here). It’s hard to say how many body paragraphs your researched argument will contain, but this essay should clock in at somewhere between 1800 and 2200 words in length. You’ll be called upon to write only one researched argument for this class, and while you might begin early on at least thinking about this essay and doing preliminary research, it’s likely that for the first part of the quarter you’ll focus mainly on summary/response writing; however, by roughly the mid-point of the quarter—around the second week in May, say—you should be shifting your attention to the preliminary steps involved in your researched argument, and certainly it should be your primary, and likely your sole, focus by no later than the third week in May.