Welcome to your homepage for Mark Willhardt's section of English 110.  This syllabus will act as both your guide and contract for this course, so be sure to keep a hard copy with you, as well as check back often:  I'm infamous for changing my syllabi and what's on the web is always the most current -- and definitive -- syllabus for the course.
 

• Faigley, Lester and Selzer, Jack.  Good Reasons with Contemporary Arguments.  3rd Edition.   New York: Pearson/Longman, 2007.
   
• Hacker, Diana.  The Bedford Handbook.  7th Edition.  Boston:  Bedford/St. Martins, 2006.  (This is the same book required in Introduction to Liberal Arts.)

One of the most challenging aspects of college is learning that you've got something to say, something which matters.  That idea might seem odd to you,  since most of you have no problems talking -- which means that you must be saying something all the time, right?  Right.  The problem is that once you come to "college" discussions and writing, you might feel that you lack the information, confidence, and skill to communicate well what you've got to say or that what you've got to say is obvious, pointless, worthless.  And those things might mean that you don't speak at all, which would be a shame.

This course, then, is going to be about learning to speak what's on your mind in such a way that your audience is going to listen and, maybe, be convinced that what you're saying is not only smart, but that it's also right.  To do this, you're going to have to learn a variety of ways to communicate your opinions and ideas to an audience via your writing.  By concentrating on a number of commonly used "modes" of written communication -- forms which you're going to employ time and again in your college careers -- we're going to see if we can't get you to hone your writing and your ideas at the same time.
 

After completing ENGL 110, you will be able to:

• Use the steps in the writing process to compose well-reasoned, informed arguments.
   

• Identify and use developmental and organizational strategies for effective thesis-focused writing. 
   

• Write college-level essays characterized by appropriate word choice and diction, standard usage, spelling, and mechanics.
   

• Practice effective critical and close reading strategies in nonfiction essays.

You will write FOUR thesis-focused essays during the course of this semester, including a brief research project.  Each of these essays will engage of different "mode" of writing, which means that no two pieces will be exactly alike during the semester.  What binds, them, however is that you have to start with an arguable assertion -- a "thesis" -- and then presents reasons why your assertion makes sense.  In this regard, everything we're going to be writing will be argumentative, an attempt to put forth your own ideas and opinions for a given audience.

The modal essays we will engage in here are:
 

• A Film, Game or Music Review (Evaluation)
  • Evaluative essays are pieces which ask you to judge one thing's worth against a standard.  Sometimes that standard will be understood:  you've been told forever that complete sentences are better than fragments so there's no need to write out that point.  Other times the standards will be explicit:  sometimes fragments are used for effect in a piece of writing and you'd need to tell us that is better than having unintentional fragments. 

• A Proposal
  • When you write a proposal you're taking a stand on an issue and devising a way to resolve it.  You have to state the problem clearly and then lay out the most convincing reasons why your solution is suitable, if not the best one. 

• A Position Essay
  • Like the Proposal, a position essay is one where you take a stand on an issue.  Unlike the Proposal, however, the goal is not to suggest a solution but to demonstrate that your vision of the issue makes the most sense.  In order to do this, you have to examine not only your side of things, but understand the other side fully, acknowledging its strong points, then answering back with your own claims.

• A Research Project
  • Most of you will have written a "research paper" in high school.  Mostly this was a string of quotations, I'm betting.  That means that you did your notecards (lots of them) and made your outline, then put in quotations where the roman numerals were.  You strung quotes together.  Real research starts with a question you want to answer and moves you through to an answer.  It makes you argue your own point of view using the evidence of other people's work along the way.  We're going to be writing a very brief research essay based upon a packet of materials that I will give you.  You will use those materials -- and only those materials -- as the work which will support the argument that you want to make.

Finally, I would like you to keep ALL your prewritings, draft materials, feedback sheets and final copies in ONE folder -- your Portfolio -- if you would.  I will be examining all of these in my reading of your finished work and so need to have all of them in one place. 
 

In this class, the most important thing is to learn how to think and to write. Counterintuitively, grades don't always help this, mostly because you're trying to figure out what I want to hear rather than learning what you need to know.  Often if you're writing to get a grade, it's likely that you're not going to do so well in here because you're missing the most fundamental thing about writing:  it's done to teach yourself something, not done to earn some mark.  Once you accept that, you're going to find that writing comes easier.

First of all, to learn the things we're covering in this class, you have to be in this class.  You have four absences allowed in this class, free for nothing.  On the fifth, however, I reserve the right to fail you for the course; missing more than one week of any given semester means that you've missed a great deal indeed.  So, please, take the four cuts, but don't take any more.

Learning things is hard, primarily because you have to fail a great deal to get better.  (Think of learning to walk -- more time down than up for a while, isn't there?)  I know that you've been "writing" for a long time, but most of you haven't really engaged the full of your intellectual abilities while you've been doing it.  I'm going to ask that you do.  And, initially, it's likely that you're going to fall down when I ask you to.  This is normal, expected, and, finally, worthwhile.

What does "falling down" mean, though, exactly?  Well, it means that initially you're likely to receive grades lower than what you've received before.  My standards are higher, my criticisms more probing, my reactions fuller than the teachers you've had before (at least I'm betting they are); these things mean that I believe in giving you lots of feedback on your writing and I expect that you will use that feedback to improve your pieces, taking criticism from one essay and using it to help you with the next.  I believe that your responsibility is to apply yourself to each draft, rough and final, so that you improve it in substantial ways.  This improvement will help tell the story of what you've learned over the course of the semester.
 

Like most profs, I employ a fairly standard range of grades:

	An "A" indicates an essay which achieves all the goals of a given assignment with excellence, including fluent writing skills.
	A "B" indicates a good essay, with solid writing and most of the goals met.
	A "C" indicates an average essay, with writing and goals that are okay but which still need focus, craft and more time devoted to them.
	A "D" indicates an essay which often has the form and some of the writing of the specific mode which we're employing, but lacks a central, convincing focus, doesn't support its points, and/or has many writing problems.
	An "F" indicates an essay that does not meet a majority of the criteria set forward in the assignment and evaluation sheet.
	Pluses and minuses act as indicators of which direction the essay tends -- better toward the grade above or worse toward the grade below.

Because I believe that writing is revision -- something we'll talk about endlessly in class -- I also believe that you ought to have the opportunity to revise your weakest single work during the course of the semester.  Thus, I would encourage you to choose one of your essays and revise it for a higher mark. 

In order to do this three things must happen:

	You must make an office appointment with me to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the piece, and to plot revision strategies;
	You must demonstrate substantial revisions to the piece (which means changing structure, argument, support, etc. and not just "correcting" punctuation and what I've marked in my line-edits); and
	You must write me a cover letter to the revision telling me what you did and why you did it as you revised the piece.

The revision will be due one week after the first essay is returned to you.  This deadline is non-negotiable.
 

Finally, though I believe that page limits are often more problematic than helpful, I also believe that any adequate discussion of any topic worth discussing (and anything you write in here is worth discussing) can't be done in less than three pages.  Since part of the purpose of learning a writing process is to help you develop an idea over time, three pages is a suitable minimum length to demonstrate that development. This means that two-page "essays" -- which I would really consider a class exercise only -- will be given an "F" upon their reception and returned unmarked.  Should that occur, I would suggest you immediately schedule an appointment with me and take that essay as your revision.
 

This is really simple:  if you copy someone else's direct words or exact ideas -- intentionally or not -- without giving them credit you fail the class.  Universities and colleges are built upon the notion that ideas matter; if you plagiarize someone else's ideas, you're denying that fundamental tenet.  Thus there will be zero tolerance for plagiarism in here.  (Please see also p. 31 "Academic Dishonesty" in the college's  2005-06 catalog and Section 54 of Hacker's Bedford Handbook.)