ENGLISH 10600-802 First-Year CompositionWriting about Writing

RACHEL REYNOLDS HEAV 209 W 2:30-4:30 PM reynol55@purdue.edu

MONDAY Classroom HEAV 107 ENGL 10600-802 CRN 57766 TUESDAY Conferences HEAV 223 ENGL 10600-806 CRN 57770

ENGL 106 Fall 2014 M-F 8:30-9:20 AM http://courses.rhetorike.org/reynolds1

WEDNESDAY Lab BRNG B274 ENGL 10600-802 CRN 57766 THURSDAY Classroom HEAV 107 ENGL 10600-802 CRN 57766 FRIDAY Conferences HEAV 223 ENGL 10600-805 CRN 57769

Everyone will meet together three times a week in the classroom and computer lab listed above. In addition to these three meetings we will also meet for conferences once a week. You should be scheduled for one of the conference days listed above and are required to attend conferences only on your scheduled day. COURSE DESCRIPTION Welcome to First-Year Composition! Among other things, this course will provide you with extensive practice in writing clear and effective prose, as well as a good deal of instruction in organization, audience, style, and research-based writing. Our syllabus approach for this courseone of eight in the Introductory Composition Program at Purdue (ICaP)is Writing about Writing, one that asks students to engage in a semester-long exploration of the meta in all its forms (meta-commentary, meta-language, meta-knowledge) by reading about reading and writing about writing. Please find below a description of the approach, according to ICaP: Although Writing about Writing Courses can be taught in a variety of ways, this approach, as taught by instructors at Purdue, typically includes the following units: Literacy Narratives, Rhetorical Situations, Discourse Communities, and Academic Discourses. Sequencing of units varies from instructor to instructor but usually invites students to first examine and acknowledge their personal literacies and to notice the (political, economic, social, etc.) implications of literacy development. Then, it allows students to consider the relationships between literacy practices, rhetorical situations, and discourse communities. The sequencing then situates academic and/or public writing as literacy practices within and aimed toward particular discourse communities. In accordance with the ICaP Goals, Means, and Outcomes, the Writing about Writing approach integrates multimodal composing and research. Although multimodal composing is often integrated through the course, the Rhetorical Situations unit typically involves the most visible production in a

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medium besides text. The Discourse Communities unit typically involves primary research, and the Academic Discourses unit typically integrates secondary research. REQUIRED TEXTS The Norton Field Guide to Writing Third Edition Richard Bullock ISBN 978-0-393-91956-1

Writing about Writing: A College Reader First Edition Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs ISBN 978-0312534936

Composing Yourself: A Student Guide to Introductory Composition at Purdue Blackmon, Haynes, and Pinkert ISBN 978-1-59871-745-1

COURSE POLICIES Attendance & Assignments A sign-in sheet will be passed around to students during the first five minutes of class. If you are not in your seat when the sheet comes around, and you do not sign it, you will be marked absent for the day. If you arrive late, after the sheet has already been returned to me, and wish to add your name to the list, it is your responsibility to see me after class to do so. I will allow you to sign in late, but you will lose participation points for those days. Three late days will be treated as an absence. Treat a missed class as a lunch date with a friend that, sadly, youll have to break. Email me as early as possible before missing a class. I will excuse three absences without penalty over the course of the semester. At your fifth absence, I will require a conference with you to discuss your attendance. An eighth absence will result in your failure of the course. Note that your attendance in class counts towards your participation grade. If you miss class, it is your responsibility to get any discussion notes, homework assignments, and important announcements from me, and to make up any missed work by the following class day. If REYNOLDSSPRING 2014

you know you wont be able to complete an assignment on time, you may arrange with me ahead of time to turn an assignment in late. All other late work will be graded at half-credit. All assignments should be turned in to me in class, in hard copy, and in the following format: twelvepoint Times New Roman font, double-spaced, with one-inch margins on all sides and MLA-style citations. Assignments sent via email will not be accepted. Electronic Communication, Electronics in the Classroom Well be using two different methods for out-of-class communication this semester, the first of which is our course website (Drupal), which I will be expecting you to check regularly for information regarding your assignments, including whats due each day, what well be doing in class, and what your homework for the following day will be. In addition, Ill be sending you updates and announcements by email on a regular basis. Be sure to check your email frequently for these. (See Composing Yourself: A Student Guide to Introductory Composition at Purdue for guidelines on how to format an appropriate email to your instructor.) Cell phones need to be turned off or switched to silent (not vibrate) and put away during class time. If you need to access a reading online, please bring your laptop to class, or better yet, print it out. Using your cell phone in class, or allowing it to disrupt the class by ringing or vibrating, will reflect negatively on your participation grade. Academic Integrity Welcome to the community of college readers and writers! Part of your responsibility, as a new member of our group, is to maintain not just your own academic integrity, but the integrity of our shared profession. Academic dishonestly lowers the standard for us all, and threatens the safety and security of our neighborhood in shared texts. The English Department at Purdue defines plagiarism as using without credit the ideas or expressions of others, that is, failure to acknowledge your sources. In order to avoid academic dishonesty, DO NOT 1) use word for word, without acknowledgement, phrases, sentences, or paragraphs from the printed or manuscript material of others; 2) use with only slight changes the material of others; 3) use the general plan, main headings, or rewritten form of others material. Know that copying and pasting from the web is stealing. A good rule of thumb is to cite anything that isnt common knowledge. See Composing Yourself for more on plagiarism. Penalties for plagiarism vary from failure of the plagiarized assignment to expulsion from the university, and may include failure for the course and notification of the Dean of Students Office. The Department of English considers the previous explanation to be official notification of the nature and seriousness of plagiarism. (Composing Yourself) Additional Policies The following additional policies are covered in Composing Yourself: Grief Absence Policy, Violent Behavior Policy, Students with Disabilities Policy, Emergencies Policy, Nondiscrimination Policy. REYNOLDSSPRING 2014

Purdue Universitys student conduct code, rules and regulations, and a guide for students to academic integrity can be found online at Student Conduct http://www.purdue.edu/studentregulations/student_conduct/index.html Regulations Governing Student Conduct, Disciplinary Proceedings, and Appeals http://www.purdue.edu/studentregulations/student_conduct/regulations.html Academic Integrity: A Guide for Students http://www.purdue.edu/odos/osrr/academicintegritybrochure.php CREDIT & GRADING For this course, the ICaP grading guidelines will be used as our scale. For general guidelines regarding what constitutes each letter grade, please see Composing Yourself. A detailed rubric and assignment sheet will be distributed for each unit. Credit for the course will be distributed as follows: Unit 1: Literacy Narratives Unit 2: Rhetorical Situations Unit 3: Discourse Communities Unit 4: Academic Discourses Final Unit: Final Portfolio In-Class Attendance and Participation ASSIGNMENTS BREAKDOWN Unit 1: Literacy Narratives (20%) Unit 1 asks you to write a Literacy Narrative, that is, to tell a story about some event/s that was/were important to your development as a reader and writer. You may decide to begin with your earliest memory of reading or writing and work your way to the present day, or to isolate a specific memory or memories and discuss its/their significance to your literacy history. You may choose to write about your literacy in the traditional senseabout becoming the reader and writer you are todayor about some other form of literacy. If you chose to write about your literacy in one of these things, you must be able to convince me that they are languages in themselves, and of your fluency in them. Unit 2: Rhetorical Situations (20%) Unit 2 is concerned with Rhetorical Situations. It requires you to compose in a new medium of your choice a multimedia composition. For this project, the rhetorical square of genre, purpose, audience, and stance is up to you. Regardless of whom you choose to address and how you choose to address them, however, you must consider first and foremost in your making Aristotles rhetorical triangle of ethos, pathos, and logos. To begin, choose a piece of writing from another class and recast it for a new audience, in a new medium. Will your composition be primarily visual, auditory, or some combination of both? This time, thats up to you. REYNOLDSSPRING 2014 20% 20% 20% 20% 10% 10%

Unit 3: Discourse Communities (20%) Unit 3 is twofold. Part one has had us thinking and talking about discourse communities, as defined by John Swales in The Concept of Discourse Community, James Paul Gee in Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics, and Ann M. Johns in Discourse Communities and Communities of Practice. Part two has you writing your own ethnographic essay, that is, a scientific description of an individual culture, in which you paint a complete portrait of, and then work to analyze/examine critically, a discourse community of which you are currently or were recently a part of. In order to complete this assignment, you will need first to choose a research method from one of four options. Unit 4: Academic Discourses (20%) Unit 4 considers the locus of Academic Discourses within the larger context of the Discourse Communities studied in Unit 3. This assignment asks you to choose an academic/scholarly article from within your specific discipline or field of study, then to write a three- to five-page analysis of itin a formal or informal manner, of your choosing and dependent upon the structure/function of your articleusing what youve learned about entering the conversation to put in your oar or find a niche in thinking and talking about your article. Final Unit: Final Portfolio (10%) This final unit asks you to create a digital research and writing portfolio (in the form of a website by Weebly, Wix, or WordPress) showcasing your work throughout the semester, for an audience that includes your classmates but also a larger online community. Your digital portfolio must include, but is not limited to 1) final drafts of all four of your essays to date (literacy narrative, multimedia composition, ethnographic essay, and article analysis), 2) a glossary of terms for your groups assigned unit, and 3) a one- to two-page reflection on your learning in the class.

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