Required Texts:

Welcome to The Real Beginning of Your Major!

On behalf of the MC English Department, I'd like to welcome you to Boot Camp for English Majors.  You're in a for a tough but rewarding semester as you begin to learn in earnest all those skills which you'll build upon in your next years here.  The English Department believes that these skills are so fundamental to your successful careers that we instituted a course dedicated just to teaching them to you.

But what is "this course"?  Well, drawing upon department-wide discussions, my colleague Rob Hale put it so eloquently in his syllabus the first year English 200 was offered that I want to quote it extensively at the start of my own: 

This course is designed to introduce majors to the broad range of scholarship and practice within the discipline of English and the specific ways that members of the Monmouth College English faculty approach the discipline.  The course is divided into three overlapping areas which "English" embodies:  the practical, the theoretical, and the professional.  Included will be emphasis upon close reading and research skills, as well as overviews of the history of the discipline, creative writing, literary criticism and theory, and vocational paths.

We will begin the course with an emphasis on the close reading of poetry and couple that with attention to developing a writing process that will serve you in the short-term as English majors and in the long-term in the workplace and your personal lives.  Both the faculty of the English Department and some of our successful majors will give you their views on what constitutes "good" writing and how to produce it.  We will then begin a discussion of the history of criticism and how authors and critics have valued and read literature over time, consider some of the forces that have influenced the evolution of the literary canon, and connect this discussion to the history of the discipline and how literature has been taught over the last two centuries.  Next we will turn to [a novel] to practice close reading of fiction, to consider the similarities and differences between closely reading fiction and poetry, and to examine how the reception of this novella embodies issues related to the expansion of the literary canon.  We will also discuss several schools of twentieth-century literary theory and explore [the novel] through the lens of those theoretical perspectives.  In tandem with our work on [the novel], criticism, and theory, you will learn about the research resources available to English majors, develop an effective research process, and practice using those resources by developing your own research paper.  Additionally, we will have a number of panel discussions on topics of interest to English majors and minors including creative writing, career opportunities, and off-campus programs.  Ultimately, the course should help you become a better writer and thinker, give you a basic understanding of the vocabulary, concepts, and conventions of literary analysis and English studies, and give you insight on how to use these skills and knowledge in the major, in future jobs, and in avocations.

Now wasn't that lovely?  Basically, we're going for seven concrete objectives.  By the end of this class you will be able to:

Participation

Participation is the essence of any successful college career -- or, indeed, of any career at all.  "Participation" doesn't simply mean attendance, however.  Gone are the days when being here counts for something.  Instead, "participation" means that you've done the reading, that you've done the writing, that you've got ideas about both, and that you're ready and willing to share them.  It means you talk up and talk out, that you engage the project and ideas of the class, and that you do it daily.

So read and write and talk.  A lot.  Though I've got things that I'm going to have to direct and correct here, I want you to carry the bulk of the conversation.  After all, it's your class and your skills.

To participate you've got to be here.  Thus, you've got four free-for-nothing skip days to use.  On the fifth, however, your final letter grade drops one full grade, and continues one letter grade off for every absence thereafter.  This means that if you started with an "A," on your eighth absence you've earned an "F."  Use your four, then -- but don't use any more.  (Excused absences of the usual sort -- okayed beforehand, if possible; documented afterward -- will not count against your four.)

Grades

Here's how it breaks down:

English Department Writing Policy for Majors

Writing is central to the English major; therefore, the Department of English has implemented a policy to encourage excellence in writing:

The faculty in the Department of English will return papers written by English majors, if they

• do not follow correct MLA documentation (including failure to integrate quotations correctly, misplaced punctuation, incorrect work cited entries, etc.);

• include more than one major grammatical error (run-on sentences [including fused sentences and comma splices], subject-verb agreement errors, and fragments);

• contain excessive minor errors (i.e., misuses of commas, semicolons, misspellings, etc. which display a failure to proofread).

Instructors will return papers, final papers will be reduced by one letter grade, and students will have forty-eight hours to revise and re-submit papers. In many cases, instructors will not have read the entire paper once they have determined that an essay fails to meet the minimum requirements; consequently, students will need to review and revise essays from beginning to end to make corrections. If essays fail to meet these minimum standards after re-submission, students will earn Fs for those assignments.

The Mellinger Learning Center

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