Writing I:
Writing and Democracy
ENGLISH 2100 JMWI
Fall 2020
Professor: Dr. Jennifer Sylvor
If you’d prefer to download this as a file, you can do so here.
Scheduled Meeting Times: MW 12:25 – 2:05 (This is an ONLINE course, but we will be using these scheduled times to come together as a class, to work in small groups, and for individual conferences.)
Email: jennifer.sylvor@baruch.cuny.edu (the best way to reach me) or jsylvor@gmail.com (Use this email address when you need to hear back from me immediately.) If your communication is not time sensitive, use my baruch email address.
Welcome to English 2100! This course is, first and foremost, an introduction to college writing. We will work together over the course of the semester to equip you with the skills, confidence, and understanding you will need to be a successful writer in college and beyond. As you know, even if we don’t consider ourselves to be “writers,” we all spend a lot of time every day communicating through writing. We will consider all of the various contexts and audiences for whom we write and will think strategically about their different stylistic codes and standards. My goal is to meet you where you are as a writer and to help you gain even greater control and fluency in all your written expression.
Central to this course is the difficult, yet satisfying and stimulating work of writing. There is no magic secret to becoming a more skilled writer; the only way to improve your writing is to write more. Expect that you will be engaging in writing of one sort or another for the duration of the semester: either thinking about a writing project, composing drafts, responding to your peers’ writing, writing about things you’ve read or seen, exploring your own life experience through writing, posting to our class blog, and more…. Formal assignments include personal narrative, textual analysis, persuasive essay, and research-based writing. The course will emphasize both the process and the product of essay writing. Every piece of good, successful writing undergoes an evolution and develops over time through reading, questioning, and careful editing. For this reason, you will learn how to develop, organize, draft, and revise your essays through the processes of critical reading, informal writing assignments, in-class workshops, self-analysis, peer review, and individual conferences with me.
Goals
After completing ENG 2100, you should be able to:
- Read and analyze texts critically. Analyze and interpret key ideas in various discursive genres (e.g. essays, news articles, speeches, documentaries, plays, poems, short stories), with careful attention to the role of rhetorical conventions such as style, tropes, genre, audience, and purpose.
- Write your own texts critically. Compose with an awareness of your own rhetorical situation (audience, purpose, genre, medium) and the role personal experience and social convention play in shaping how and what we write.
- Identify and engage with credible sources and multiple perspectives. Identify sources of information and evidence credible to your audience; incorporate multiple perspectives in your writing by summarizing, interpreting, critiquing, and synthesizing the arguments of others; and avoid plagiarism by ethically acknowledging the work of others when used in your own writing, using a citation style appropriate to your audience and purpose.
- Compose as a process. Experience writing as a creative way of thinking and generating knowledge and as a process involving multiple drafts, review of your work by members of your discourse community (e.g. instructor and peers), revision, and editing, reinforced by reflecting on your writing process in metacognitive ways.
- Use conventions appropriate to audience, genre, and purpose. Adapt writing and composing conventions (including your style, content, organization, document design, word choice, syntax, citation style, sentence structure, and grammar) to your rhetorical context.
COURSE THEME:
The theme of our work together this semester is “Writing and Democracy.” During this election season, there is no better time to consider what it means to be part of a democracy. We will be reflecting on our own lives and values in order to identify what we have at stake in the upcoming elections. How do our political choices connect to our own life experiences and those of our families or loved ones? We will also be investigating all of the different modes of communication that arise around our political process: speeches, slogans, advertisements, twitter threads, editorials, etc… are all part of our political conversation. As part of our work together, I will be asking you to add your voice to this communal conversation – both inside the (virtual) classroom and outside in the larger world.
Our reading and writing assignments will be designed to engage with this course theme of democracy. My hope is that you will find yourself settling on topics that truly excite and energize you and that you will begin to think about writing as a tool to clarify one’s own thinking, communicate with others, and even effect change in the world.
MAJOR PROJECTS
The following are your major formal assignments for English 2100. I will be providing you with detailed instructions for each of them over the course of the semester, posted to our course blog.
Project 1: Personal Narrative
This project situates you within the context of the course theme by asking you to consider how your personal history and political views intersect. We are all the product of a tangled web of influences; our family backgrounds, life experience, and core values all inform the lens through which we view the larger world. For this first essay, you will be exploring how a particular lived experience or aspect of your own background connects to a political belief or commitment of yours.
Project 2:Rhetorical Analysis
Analyzing texts is a key skill for being a good reader and writer and forms one of the core goals of this course. It involves a number of processes that we do all the time intuitively, but which you may never have thought of or which you may not be able to name. For this assignment, you will be engaging in a close analysis of a single text – in this case, a political speech – and seeking to describe and understand the rhetorical maneuvers that are at work in the text.
Project 3: Research-Based Writing
For this group-based project, you will be engaging in research around a particular topic that is of vital interest in the 2020 U.S. elections. Our goal here is to cultivate the research and writing skills that will allow us to gain a deep and comprehensive understanding of those issues that concern us most deeply. In a world that is increasingly media-saturated, how do we distinguish reliable or authoritative sources from opinion or propaganda? Together with a small group of your peers, you will be compiling an annotated guide to a particular election issue and sharing it with the class. This is a project which will not only meet the requirements of this particular assignment, but will also be offering a resource that will be valuable beyond our classroom as well.
Project 4: Persuasive Writing
For this final project, you will be authoring an opinion piece that builds on the research you conducted for Project 3. This is an opportunity to make the case for a position, policy, or point of view about which you feel passionately. We will be looking at a variety of examples of this genre in order to understand what rhetorical strategies might best serve our purposes, given our intended audience and the context for this argument.
HOW WILL THIS COURSE WORK?
Synchronous (“live”) Meetings: We will be having a regular zoom session on Wednesdays at 12:30. Unless you hear otherwise from me, assume that you will be expected to log on to a call each Wednesday. You can find the link for our call on the course blog (url listed above.) These calls will be recorded, and I will be posting the link to the recording within 24 hours after each call. If you miss a class and don’t wish to be penalized for your absence, you will need to watch the class recording and complete a short assignment about the class. (You will be able to access instructions for this on the blog.) We will be using our Monday sessions, also at 12:30 pm, for meetings in small groups and for conferences. You may not need to log on for a meeting every week during our Monday class session, but you should leave this time slot open and dedicated to English 2100.
Asynchronous Work: If “synchronous” refers to things that we all do at the same time, “asynchronous” is its opposite, meaning not at the same time. A significant portion of the work for this course will happen asynchronously. Each Monday morning, by 9 am, your work for the week will be posted, and you will be expected to work on these assignments on your own throughout the week, reaching out to the professor with questions or problems and consulting with your classmates as needed. It’s up to you to figure out how to organize this independent work. Keep in mind that the rule of thumb for college classes is that students should expect to do two hours of work outside the classroom for every hour of scheduled class time. You may find that you do even more that that during the weeks when major assignments are due and then less on weeks with no major writing assignments.
Attendance: You are expected to attend all scheduled zoom meetings as well as all scheduled small group meetings and one-on-one conferences with the professor. If you need to miss a session, it is your responsibility to reach out to the professor to notify her of your absence, to contact a classmate to find out what you missed, to watch the recording of the zoom class when it becomes available, and to submit a missed-class form. We will begin class with a check-in each week, but I will be taking official attendance later during the session.
Preparedness: It is your responsibility to come to class prepared to discuss the assigned readings, where appropriate, as well as to have completed any assignments that were to be done before class. If reading has been assigned, be sure to have the reading accessible and ready to refer to during our zoom calls. Additionally, you should come to each class with a pen and paper or the ability to take notes on your computer or other device.
Participation: This class cannot succeed without your participation. I hope you will feel comfortable adding your voice to our classroom conversations on a regular basis. What does participation look like in an online course? It will mean speaking up and sharing your thoughts during our zoom calls, participating in online discussion on our course blog, and working with your peers on group projects both inside and out of class. Expect that you will periodically be asked to share your writing with the group and to offer feedback on your classmates’ writing. Keep the Golden Rule in mind, and treat your classmates’ work with the same respect and consideration you’d like your own writing to receive. We will undoubtedly be discussing sensitive issues in class; it’s important to we all commit to creating an open-minded, respectful space in our classroom community, so that we all feel comfortable participating.
Technology: Technology is what makes remote learning possible. To participate fully in this course, you will need access to a computer or tablet and reliable internet service. We will be using several different applications or platforms for communicating with one another – blogs@baruch, e-mail, Zoom, turnitin.com, and google docs among others. See below for more details.
Blogs@Baruch: Our course blog is the heart of our online course. This is the first place you should go if you have any questions about the course. This is where you can find your weekly assignments on Mondays, where you will be participating in online discussions with your peers, where you will be posting your informal writing assignments, and where I will share announcements with the class.. I will upload all handouts and assignments to the site. We will be also be using the blog to share and comment on outside sources related to our theme. If you have ideas about how we might make better use of this or other technology, please let me know. This is a collaborative site that belongs to all of us, so I expect to see it grow and change with your contributions. You have already been added to the blog as an “author,” so you shouldn’t have any difficulty logging on and posting. Be aware that, while it’s unlikely that anyone outside of our course will be looking at the site regularly, this is technically a public blog. The url for the blog is: www.blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/eng2100f20sylvor. Please bookmark it, and keep it handy!
Turnitin.com: You will be submitting your formal paper for this class electronically via turnitin.com. I will be making my comments and grading your paper using turnitin.com’s platform in order to provide secure, paper-free feedback. Turnitin.com also offers “originality” screening. This means that the website uses software that identifies any material in your uploaded paper that also appears either in published works or in other paper that have been uploaded to the site. Before you can upload papers for this class to turnitin.com, you need to set up an account using your Baruch College email address. This process has two steps. First, go to turnitin.com and create an account for yourself. Then enroll in our course, using the following information:
Class ID: 25922784
Enrollment Key: democracy
Zoom: We will be using Zoom’s videoconferencing technology for our class meetings, small group sessions, and one-on-one conferencing by appointment or during open office hours. Links for these sessions will be shared on our class blog. You are expected to attend all scheduled sessions and to notify me in advance if you will be missing a class or a scheduled meeting or group session. I will do my best to make our Zoom classes engaging and effective. In order for them to be successful, we will all have to be active participants. There will be regular opportunities during our calls for you to share ideas with the class, pause for brief writing exercises, and connect with your classmates in small groups. All of this will work best if we all have our cameras on. I recognize that there may be times during the semester when turning on your camera is simply not a good option for you, but my expectation is that we will all make an effort to keep our cameras on as much as possible. If you have a technological limitation or other issue that will make that impossible, please reach out to me about as soon as possible, so that we can come up with an alternative plan for your participation.
Essays: All formal essays will be submitted via turnitin.com. Informal work will be either posted to our class blog or shared with me via email or google docs. Grades will be reduced at a rate of one half-grade a day for each day an essay is late. Essays must be typewritten in 12 pt. type and double-spaced. If you do not have regular access to a computer or tablet, informal writing assignments may be handwritten and submitted as photos or scans. Late drafts will receive no feedback. You will have opportunities to submit rewrites for most of our formal assignments, provided that you consult with me before embarking on the revision.
Academic Integrity: Plagiarism and cheating are serious academic offenses and will not be tolerated. Plagiarism means presenting another author’s words or ideas without crediting them to their source. When you include another author’s words in your work, whether from a printed source, from the internet, or from a live presentation, those words must appear in quotation marks and be properly cited. When you include another person’s ideas in your work, you must indicate where you found those ideas, even if you are paraphrasing rather than quoting them. If you have any questions at all about what constitutes plagiarism, please consult me. Any work submitted for this course that has been plagiarized will receive a failing grade and be reported to the Dean.
Cheating is also a serious academic offense. Examples of cheating include, but are not limited to: submitting essays or portions of essays written by other people, including friends and family; collaborating on an assignment without the explicit permission of the instructor; submitting an essay written for one course to another course without the explicit permission of both instructors; submitting work as one’s own that has been purchased or copied from a paper preparation service or website. All work submitted in this course must be entirely your own!
Accommodations Policy: Baruch College is committed to making individuals with disabilities full participants in its programs, services, and activities through compliance with Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990. It is the policy of Baruch College that no otherwise qualified individual with a disability shall be denied access to or participation in any program, service, or activity offered by the university. Individuals with disabilities have a right to request accommodations. If you require any special assistance or accommodation, please let me know as soon as you can, ideally during the first three weeks of the semester.
Writing Center: I will always be available to work with you on developing and executing ideas for your essays, reviewing writing mechanics, and revising and refining your work. For additional support, I encourage you to reach out to the Baruch College Writing Center. You can schedule an appointment and find out information about their workshops at https://bc.mywconline.com.
Grading:
Your grade will be calculated as follows:
Attendance and Participation (including homework, blog posts, student-led discussion, and other weekly informal writing) 25%
Project #1 – Personal Narrative 15%
Project #2 – Rhetorical Analysis 20%
Project #3 – Analytical Research Project 20%
Project #4 – Persuasive Essay 20%
