ENG 2100: Writing 1
Baruch College ⋅ Fall 2020
- Class Number: 30459
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Meeting Time: 12:25pm-2:05pm
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Professor: Zach Muhlbauer, Dept. of English
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Discord Office Hours: Wednesday, 3:00-5:00pm
Course Texts
- Course website: ENG 2100: Writing 1
- Join the Conversation, ENG 2100 Reader
- For style, editing, and source citations, I recommend using Purdue OWL
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Reminder: access to your Blogs@Baruch account is essential to class participation
Course Overview
In this class, the first of a two-course sequence in the Pathways Required Core, we’ll explore how language shapes how we view everything and everyone around us. Language makes worlds. We’ll engage with a wide variety of textual genres—essays, poetry, songs, creative non-fiction pieces, news media, academic articles, and film, for example—with careful attention to the role of genre itself as well as to the role of audience and purpose. Studying the writing styles and rhetorical moves of professional, published writers as well as the writing of fellow Baruch students will inform your approaches to your own development as a writer within academic contexts and beyond.
This course is designed to be a gateway of exploration for further writing and research you will do in your courses at Baruch. I invite you to open your mind, be ready to engage with me and your classmates, and expand your thinking about what it means to be a good writer this semester.
In response to the historic uncertainty of our present moment, and in the spirit of sense-making, the theme of our class will regard the topic of imagined futures. Together, we will grapple with our collectively shared and individually held conceptions of tomorrow: as community members and citizens of the world, as rising scholars and bearers of generational change, as up-and-coming writers and forces of untold potential. Accordingly, we will wrestle with a number of difficult questions about the passage of time and the makings of history, often in ways that compel us to think, speak, and write in the future perfect tense, namely, what will have been of our day and age when the future comes to pass? How will we make memory from the environmental, social, political, and technological complexities of this moment in time? If indeed, as William Gibson claims, “the future is already here,” then where and how might we discern its formations among us, if only to prepare accordingly?
In asking such questions, we will draw on multiple genres of discourse, ranging from essays and news articles, to poems and stories, to speeches and images and so much more.
The future looms large. Perhaps it’s time we get started.
Learning Goals
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Read and analyze texts critically: analyze and interpret key ideas in various discursive genres (e.g. essays, news articles, speeches, poems, movies, short stories), with careful attention to the role of rhetorical conventions such as style, tropes, genre, audience, and purpose.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Major Writing Projects
Major Project 1: Literacy Narrative
20% of course grade / 1300-1600 words
This project offers you a chance to reflect on your personal relationship to the theme of imagined futures by telling a story about your literacy practices, specifically in regard to the discourse of future possibilities. Building on the forward-looking questions and concerns of our class, your narrative should pay credence to your literacy in one of the topics listed in the link below. I welcome your contributions to this list and encourage you to make additions to it in the form of a Google Doc, which I will share with the group following our third class.
With your literacy narrative, it’s important to recognize that you should not only illustrate but also intertwine moments in your life when you’ve engaged with the conventions of your chosen topic, as well as situated yourself in the conversations of its discourse community. For your narrative to be a narrative, that is, you ought to demonstrate the progressive means by which literacy and knowledge develops over time. Such memories should be interlocking and relational, driving the transitional logic of your story in such a way as to converge on the present moment along with your potential for growth in the near and distant future.
Major Project 2: Rhetorical Analysis
20% of course grade / 1600-2000 words
For your second major project, you will select two artifacts (i.e. texts) and conduct a comparative analysis of their rhetorical discourse, framing your discussion in terms of one controlling exigence with a relevant link to our course theme of imagined futures. You will then outline the rhetorical purpose of your artifacts in effort to explore how they converge in their shared response to a particular exigency. Your next step will be to critically engage with textual evidence from the rhetorical discourse of these artifacts, explaining how their use of rhetorical conventions effects change among a common, well-defined audience. The thesis of your paper should be one which highlights the integrated value of reading these artifacts in conversation with one another, in effect justifying the analytical claims and underlying warrant of your paper. Finally, the focus of your writing should grapple with the question and concerns of our course theme and shared readings up to this point in the term.
Major Project 3: Researched Argument
25% of course grade / 2300-2600 words (10% = RefAnnBibs)
Building on the preliminary research of your reflective annotated bibliographies and elsewhere, our third and final writing project prompts you to construct your own self-directed, exploratory research project. Now that you’ve familiarized yourself with the insights and knowledge of these external sources, that is, I ask that you establish your own research perspective by following a critically focused, well-sourced line of inquiry from start to finish. You should by extension synthesize and expand on your existing research in ways that narrow your focus, building toward a prevailing argument that unifies your paper and pays credence to the rhetorical situation of your topic. In the process, I ask that you integrate six or more sources within your paper, at least two of which should be peer-reviewed scholarly articles. These sources should bring reliable and relevant perspectives to bear on your paper, thus illustrating the key issues and debates that signal the broader discourse of your writerly focus.
Full description of Major Project 3: Researched Argument
Writing Exercises
Group Annotations
12.5% of course grade / 50-75 words per annotation
The practice of reading both socially and interactively is essential to your growth as a writer. We will tap into this skill with the use of the social reading application called Hypothesis. Group annotations will help you to organize your thoughts in preparation for class dialogue, in part by making the comments and conversations of our class more visible as we navigate key readings and artifacts over this term.
Full description of Group Annotations
Blog Posts
12.5% of course grade / 250-300 words per blog post
There’s much to be learned from writing in ways that are at once self-reflective and public-facing. With this is mind, I will be asking you to compose a series of blog posts over the course of the semester. These “low-stakes” writing assignments are meant to offer you a metacognitive space in which you may work through your thoughts in preparation for your three major writing projects. For prompts, tips, and guidelines on how to move forward with your blog posts this semester, access our Blogs page or else refer to my instructions in our classroom server on Discord.
Course Policies
Grading
I use a 100% grading scale to assess individual assignments and your final course grade, as is commonly the case at Baruch. If you have a question or concern about your grade in the class, please bring it to my attention immediately.
B+ 87-89 C+ 77-79 D+ 67-69 A 93-100 B 83-86 C 73-76 D 60-66 A- 90-92 B- 80-82 C- 70-72
What I Expect From You
I expect that you will attend each class and complete the assignments due. Learning is a collaborative activity, and I expect that you will be attentive to, engaged with, and respectful of everyone in the class, especially in light of the fact that we’re still in the middle of a global pandemic. We’re all in this together, and I expect that our class this spring will be a source of encouragement rather than distress when it comes to interacting with each other.
I ask that we all be respectful of one another and the wonderfully diverse opinions, ethnic backgrounds, gender expressions and sexual orientations, social classes, religious beliefs, and ethnicities among us. In the same spirit, written work in this course should employ inclusive language, which shows that the writer honors the diversity of the human race by not using rhetoric that would universalize one element of humanity to the exclusion of others. For example, use men and women or people instead of the generic man; use they or alternate he and she instead of the generic “he” to represent “all people.”
What You Can Expect From Me
I will treat you with respect and will spend a good deal of time this semester giving you feedback on your writing for your major projects, commensurate to the amount of time you spend on your writing. I will always read and often respond to your annotations and blog posts, keeping note of your intellectual interests as well as your writing habits and styles, all in an effort to offer you the thoughtful feedback that you deserve when responding to your major writing projects.
Feedback
Professor
You will have opportunities to meet with me about each project you’re working on during our studio time at the end of (some) classes. I also may hold conferences with each student individually during regular class time in my office in lieu of a formal class meeting. If the latter, it’s important that you make the conference or you will be counted absent for class on that day. If you ever have questions about your grade or progress in the course, or about an assignment you’re working on, please do not hesitate to ask me, either by direct messaging, emailing, or making an appointment with me going forward.
Writing Center
As a writer you’ll want to seek feedback from many different readers. Writers at all levels of experience get feedback on their writing. Asking for and receiving feedback is not a sign of weakness and it does not equal weak writing; it’s actually a sign of wisdom and makes your writing much stronger. You’ll give feedback to and get feedback from your fellow writers in your writing groups in this class throughout the semester and at all stages of your projects. I also encourage you to get feedback on your writing from professional writing consultants (some of whom also teach first-year writing courses) at the Writing Center.
The Writing Center offers free, one-to-one (in-person and online) and small-group workshop writing support to all Baruch students. The Center’s consultants work collaboratively with you to deepen your writing and English language skills. At any step in the process, they’ll help you become a more confident and versatile writer. I encourage you to schedule your appointment well in advance of when your writing is due. You can schedule an appointment at: https://bc.mywconline.com/. Visit the Writing Center in NVC 8-185 or at the Newman Library Reference Desk, or log on to their website, writingcenter.baruch.cuny.edu, to learn more.
Late Work
All writing assignments should be submitted prior to the stated deadline. Given the extraordinary time in which we’re living, however, I will be open to granting extensions for longer writing assignments, but only if you email me requesting the extension well ahead of the deadline. I may also request to meet with you during my office hours to bounce around ideas for how to budget your time more efficiently in the future. You should try your absolute best to meet these deadlines, but I understand that certain factors are out of our control this semester and will do my best to be as flexible and open, yet realistic, as I can about these deadlines. Finally, and most importantly, if you feel even the faintest urge to plagiarize, then please do yourself a favor and reach out to me for help. That’s what I’m here for.
Attendance
Attending class means doing the work required rather than coming to campus this spring. Much of the learning in this course happens through your doing the writing and reading assignments each week, showing up to synchronous video sessions prepared and ready to discuss your thoughts, as well as engaging wholeheartedly and thoughtfully in our in-class writing activities. You’ll be in a group with four-to-five of your peers from our class over this semester, and you will be meeting with me and them on a semi-regular to discuss the course readings and your writing projects. “Attending class,” then, means engaging with me and others in the class through class discussions, as well as doing the blog posts, Hypothesis annotations, and working with your group in various peer-review activities and writing workshops.
Disability and Accommodations
Baruch is committed to making individuals with disabilities full participants in the programs, services, and activities of the college community 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 that no otherwise qualified individual with a disability will be denied access to any program, service, or activity offered by the university. Individuals with disabilities have a right to request accommodations.
If you require any accommodation, please contact the Office of Services for Students with Disabilities at (646) 312-4590, and let me know as soon as you can, ideally during the first two weeks of class. I encourage you to meet with me to co-design accommodations. For additional information check out the Student Disability Services webpage.
Academic Integrity
It is essential that you give credit to sources of any ideas that are not your own. Plagiarism is a serious offense with severe consequences, ranging from an automatic failing grade on the assignment to a failing grade for the course, with your case reported to the Office of the Dean of Students, as is mandated by standard protocol for Academic Dishonesty at Baruch College. Each student is responsible for knowing what constitutes plagiarism and for understanding the college’s policies and procedures for academic dishonesty. For further reference, please see the official college statement on academic dishonesty, excerpted below:
Academic dishonesty is unacceptable and will not be tolerated. Cheating, forgery, plagiarism and collusion in dishonest acts undermine the college’s educational mission and the students’ personal and intellectual growth. Baruch students are expected to bear individual responsibility for their work, to learn the rules and definitions that underlie the practice of academic integrity, and to uphold its ideals. Ignorance of the rules is not an acceptable excuse for disobeying them. Any student who attempts to compromise or devalue the academic process will be ontologically sanctioned.
Classroom Conduct
A class grounded in democratic forms of discussion and collaboration requires its participants to act in an ongoing manner of respect, care, and generosity. As part of a course dedicated to the theory and practice of rhetorical expression, students are therefore expected to maintain responsible and engaged sense of awareness as to the feelings and values of their peers. If students feel it necessary to address any matter or event in conflict with the ethical code of our course and Baruch College at large, then they should not hesitate to contact me in an effort to represent and resolve their concerns.