ENG 2100 / Writing 1:
Games and Society
Fall 2023
Professor: Dr. Adrienne Raphel
Class Time & Location: ENG 2100-HMWM: MoWe 9:55a – 11:35a, A – 17 Lex 1013
ENG 2100-JMWJ: MoWe 12:25p-2:05p, A – 17 Lex 1211
ENG 2100-KMWP: MoWe 2:55p-4:35p, A – 17 Lex 1212
Office Hours: By appointment as needed. Email me and we’ll arrange either a meeting on campus or via Zoom.
Email: [email protected]
Office: VC 7-288
Texts
- Join the Conversation, 4th Ed. (ENG 2100 Reader), available in digital format for $26 through the campus bookstore.
- Create a Perusall account at perusall.com
- The onboarding process will ask you for a course code.
- Enter the following course code: RAPHEL-6FJCM
- Go to “Library” and click Join the Conversation.
- There will then be an option to purchase it there. It costs $27.99.
- However, you can also purchase the textbook through the bookstore here: https://baruch.bncollege.com/shop/baruch/page/find-textbooks. The price may be different.
- I also will post other readings to our course website, which I’ll expect you to download and have available either digitally or in hard copy when we discuss them in class.
- Course website: Please use our Blogs@Baruch for course resources, Blackboard for submissions, and Perusall for our course textbook
- https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/eng2100games/
Description
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, social media posts, film, board games, and video games, 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.
We also read several selections from Joining the Conversation, the Eng 2100 Course Textbook, which introduces formal writing strategies and vocabulary. Finally, this course involves in-depth peer review sessions in small groups, and asks you to engage extensively in the editing and revision process.
While I encourage you to take the assignments for the class in your own directions, many of the readings for the course will focus on games and the serious business of play. Board games are as old as civilization. Ancient Egyptians loved the game of hounds and jackals. Mesopotamians relished backgammon and the royal game of Ur. The Aztec bet each other in rounds of patolli. Families have played games for countless generations, and schoolchildren across the world learn how to communicate through making and breaking rules. Today, from Wordle to World of Warcraft, games are booming. In the business world, “gamification”––that is, applying game-design elements in other contexts to boost productivity––is a thriving concept. Games can be a laboratory for many of the world’s ethical and social dilemmas, from modeling climate change to testing the powers of AI. Games also have addictive powers, substituting short-term pleasure for long-term fulfillment, which business owners often use to their advantage when designing “gamified” platforms. How do games impact our lives, whether or not we recognize they’re doing so?
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.
Goals
After completing ENG 2100, you should be able to:
- 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.
- Compose with an awareness of how intersectional identity, social conventions, and rhetorical situations shape writing: Demonstrate in your writing an awareness of how personal experience, our discourse communities, social conventions, and rhetorical considerations of audience, purpose, genre, and medium shape how and what we write.
- 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, trope, genre, audience, and purpose.
- Identify and engage with credible sources and multiple perspectives in your writing: 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 writing, using a citation style appropriate to your audience and purpose.
- 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 Projects
Following are your assignments for the semester, along with the weight each carries toward your final course grade, using a 100% standard grading scale.
Major Project 1 / Literacy Narrative
This project situates you within the context of the course theme and allows you to approach course readings, and the questions that arise from them, from your own perspective and experiences.
“Literacy” in this context means more than learning to read and write; it is what you know about a certain subject––and how you came to know it. The project focuses on how the questions raised by our course theme of games and society, and the readings relate to you and your life. Work in this assignment ideally will scaffold into (build up to or relate to) your final project, the research-based argument.
- 1200 words / ~4.5 double-spaced pages (plus a Writer’s Cover Letter about your writing process and to help contextualize your work for your reviewers/writing group in the class)
- 20% of course grade
Major Project 2 / 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. Such naming (and learning new ways to name) may be the most valuable part of education, and certainly vital to being able to maneuver within various discourse communities.
- 1500 words / ~6 double-spaced pages (plus a Writer’s Cover Letter)
- 20% of course grade
Major Project 3 / Research-Based Argument
Your final project of the term asks you to learn more about a topic related to the course theme or that arises for you from the course readings. You’ll investigate the topic, form a guiding question for your research, and attempt to answer the question, using course texts and sources outside the course. You’ll integrate these sources into your own writing, ultimately coming to a (perhaps tentative) conclusion or claim (thesis) from your research and learning.
- 2000 words / ~8 double-spaced pages (plus a Writer’s Cover Letter)
- 30% of course grade
*Interlude: What Is a Writer’s Cover Letter?
For each major project, I require a cover letter of ~300-500 words (roughly 1.5-2pp. double-spaced). The cover letter does not need to be in a formal style; pretend you’re sending a casual email to a friend. However, your cover letter does need to fulfill the following tasks:
- Start with where you are physically located while writing the letter: what time is it? Where are you?
- Describe your writing process: how did the paper evolve over various drafts?
- Give one to three specific strengths of your paper: what aspects of the assignment do you feel like you accomplished most successfully?
- Give one to three specific questions about the paper: are there areas where you think you could have made different choices?
Final Reflective Project /Writer’s Letter
Your final project of the term asks you to reflect on your writing over the semester. How has your view of yourself as a writer, reader, and thinker changed since we started this term? What’s the biggest thing you’ve learned in this class? What contributed most to your learning (your writing group—maybe a certain person who gave you helpful feedback, the reading, planning or revising your writing, conferences)? What was your favorite piece of writing in the class? The most challenging? Your favorite reading? What grade would you give yourself based on your progress and your work as a whole this semester, and why?
The Final Reflective Letter does not have to be written in a formal style. You may even choose to present this as a work of creative non-fiction: a slide deck, or an interview with yourself, or a
- 1500 words / ~3 double-spaced pages
- 10% of course grade
Weekly Reading/Writing
In addition to the major projects above, you’ll also have weekly reading and writing assignments. Much of the work you’ll do on a weekly basis will help build directly toward writing your major papers/projects. Think of these weekly assignments as prep work that you can insert directly into your major papers, in a sense writing them as you go along. If you do the weekly work, in other words, you’ll save yourself a lot of time when your major papers are due, because you’ll have been writing them all along. Most readings will occur in the first half of the 14-week course; the second half of the course you will have a smaller number of readings, and the focus will be on your own writing and your research project. Below you’ll find the components of this part of the course; for details on Reading Notes and Reading Responses, see the Projects page of our course blog.
- Readings: 2-3 per week on average, most ~3-4 pages
- Weekly writing: Mostly in-class, and occasional outside-of-class, responses to the weekly readings. These will take a variety of forms, including annotations, creative responses, and self-written quizzes
- Peer feedback: Notes and letters about your classmates’ drafts in workshops and in small writing groups
- Other weekly assignments that build toward your major papers
- 20% of course grade
Grading
I use Baruch College’s 100% grading scale to assess individual assignments and your final course grade. If at any time you have a question 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 |
FAQ about being successful in this class:
How much time will the class require?
- The college standard is that students spend about two hours working outside of class for every hour spent in class. For a four-hour course such as this, that equals an average eight hours of time outside of class per week. Outside work includes reading course texts, writing blog responses to course readings, and drafting and revising your major projects.
I have a disability. Are accommodations possible?
- If you require any accommodation for a disability of any kind, please contact the Office of Services for Students with Disabilities at [email protected], and let me know as soon as you can, ideally during the first two weeks of class, so that we can design the class in a way that is accessible to your learning. I encourage you to meet with me to co-design accommodations. For additional information check out the Student Disability Services webpage.
What if I fall behind in the course?
- If you fall behind in the class for any reason, I encourage you to talk to me or see an academic advisor. I’m your ally and will work with you to figure out a way forward if at all possible.
- Rather than suffering the consequences of a failing grade, you may wish to consider dropping the class. If you feel you must withdraw, you must do so by the dates on the academic calendar (usually the 9th week of the 14-week semester).
- Please not that no longer attending class is not the same as withdrawing from the course. You will not be dropped automatically if you stop coming to class; you still will receive a grade for the course if you do not withdraw.
What about ChatGPT?
- Over the course of the semester, we’ll be experimenting with ways to engage playfully and ethically with ChatGPT and other modes of writing using AI tools, and we’ll be discussing the role of AI in our lives. ChatGPT and other intelligent technologies must never substitute for your own original work.
- If you use AI in your reading and writing practices, I expect you to be transparent about how these tools intersect with your relationship to writing and language. The cover letter is a great place to do that, for example.
For additional information, please read the following carefully:
Artificial Intelligence and Large Language Model Policy (Originally written by Katy Pearce at the University of Washington)
We know that artificial intelligence text generators like ChatGPT are powerful tools that are increasingly used by many. While they can be incredibly useful for some tasks (creating lists of things, for example), they are not a replacement for critical thinking and writing. Artificial intelligence text generators are “large language models” – they are trained to reproduce sequences of words, not to understand or explain anything. Learning how to use artificial intelligence well is a skill that takes time to develop. Moreover, there are many drawbacks to using artificial intelligence text generators for assignments and quiz answers. Some of those limitations include:
- Artificial intelligence text generators like ChatGPT are sometimes wrong. If the tool gives you incorrect information and you use it in your writing, you are held accountable for it.
- Most, if not all, artificial intelligence text generators are not familiar with our readings or class discussions and will not draw from that material when generating answers. This will result in writing that will be obviously not created by someone enrolled in the course.
It is okay for you to use artificial intelligence text generators in this course, BUT:
- You must use them in a way that helps you learn, not hampers learning. Remember that these are tools to assist you in your coursework, not a replacement for your own learning of the material, critical thinking ability, and writing skills.
- Be transparent: I expect that you will include a short paragraph at the end of the assignment –– or in the cover letter –– that explains what you used the artificial intelligence tool for and why. For example: “I used Grammarly to give me feedback on my sentence structure.” Or “I did not understand a term in the textbook and I asked ChatGPT to explain it to me.”
- If you are using artificial intelligence text generators to help you in this class and you’re not doing well on assignments, I expect that you will reflect upon the role that the tool may play in your class performance and consider changing your use. If artificial intelligence text generators are used in ways that are nefarious or unacknowledged, you may be subject to the academic misconduct policies detailed in the syllabus.
What does it mean to write and research ethically? A Note About Academic Integrity
- I’ll expect you to compose your projects ethically, meaning that if you use the work of others you cite that work, and that all work in this course is original, composed for the first time for this course, and is entirely your own, to the degree that anything we write is entirely our own. All students enrolled at Baruch are expected to maintain the highest standards of academic honesty, as defined in the Baruch Student Handbook.
- Plagiarism is presenting another’s ideas, research, or writing as your own, such as:
- Copying another person’s actual words without the use of quotation marks and footnotes (a functional limit is four or more words taken from another’s work)
- Presenting another person’s ideas or theories in your own words without acknowledgement
- Using information that is not considered common knowledge without acknowledging the source
- Plagiarism may result in a failing grade on a particular assignment, at the least, and, depending on the circumstances, a failing grade in the course. It is a serious offense that, if done knowingly and depending on the severity and other factors, can result in a failing grade (or worse) and a mark on your permanent academic record.
- If you ever have any questions or concerns about plagiarism, please ask me. You can also check out the online plagiarism tutorial prepared by members of the Newman Library faculty at http://newman.baruch.cuny.edu/help/plagiarism/default.htm and Baruch College’s academic integrity policy at http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/academic/academic_honesty.htm.
Resources for Your Writing and Research
Your Writing Group
You will be in a Writing Group with 4-5 other people for the term. You’ll do your own writing and get your own grade, but these are your people—they’ll be your sounding board for the term and who will give you feedback on your weekly writing and your Major Projects (your 3 major papers).
Meet with the Professor one-on-one for help with your projects
You and I will meet for individual conferences during the term about your writing projects. These meetings likely will be over Zoom, and you will sign up in advance.
Grammar Resources
Questions about grammar, usage, style, editing, and source citations? Check out the Purdue OWL.
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/.
Great resource for online sources in your research for this class and all classes at Baruch.
Support for English Language Learners
Student Life Resources at Baruch
The Student Resources Portal is a one-stop resource for students for help with the following and more:
- Financial Aid
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- Tools for Clear Speech
Mon Sept 18: Initial Draft of Literacy Narrative
Weds Oct 4: Final Literacy Narrative
Mon Oct 23: Initial Draft of Analysis Essay
Mon Nov 6: Final Analysis Essay
Mon Nov. 27: Initial Draft of Research Essay
Friday, Dec 15: Major Project 3 / Research Essay
Friday, Dec 15: Final Reflective / Writer’s Letter
PLEASE REFER TO OUR “CLASS SCHEDULE” PAGE FOR UP TO DATE WEEKLY READINGS AND ASSIGNMENTS