English 092/093

Summer 2011

Instructor: Elizabeth Harazim

Online / Section: OBS

E-mail: elizabeth.harazim@bellevuecollege.edu

Office: R-230 K Mailbox: R-230

REQUIRED TEXTS

A Writer’s Reference seventh ed. Hacker & Sommers ISBN: 978-0-312-60146-1

REQUIRED MATERIALS

- Regular access to the internet

- A place to back up your written work (flash drive, hard drive)

- Access to Microsoft Word

- A place to write

COURSE DESCRIPTION, OBJECTIVE AND OUTCOMES

In English 92 you will learn and practice writing skills in preparation for college composition. This course is designed to build your confidence as writers and to increase your familiarity with the writing process. Through writing assignments and class discussions you will sharpen your critical thinking skills, develop the ability to detect your own patterns of grammatical and mechanical error, practice writing under pressure and practice sustaining ideas through longer assignments.

By the end of the term you will be able to:

· Develop a workable, compelling thesis

· Consider audience

· Analyze and substantially revise your own writing

· Work with emphasis and sentence combining

· Write concise, clear paragraphs

· Sustain an idea through an essay

· Write prose that is mechanically sound

· Produce longer pieces of writing that are well developed and substantive

· Thoughtfully critique the writing of your peers

COURSEWORK

In this course we will investigate cultural factors that influence our lives. We will use articles, films, and other material as topics for our writing assignments. Our discussions will explore the relationships between written texts and your own responses to the material, and your compositions will reflect those explorations.

You will be reading and writing a great deal, and complete group work, invention techniques, analysis, revision strategies, and discussions. You will also complete short responses, reflections on your own work, reviews of your peers’ writing, and grammar assignments.

Because investigations and discussions develop according to the interest of the class as a whole, you will be taking turns, as small groups, leading the seminars and discussions. In the weekly instructions on Vista I will explain more about how this will work.

WRITTEN ASSIGNMENTS

FORMAL ESSAYS

· For each formal writing assignment you will go through several steps: invention techniques, drafting, peer review, revising, editing, and writing the final draft.

· Since we are writing in the humanities, your formal writing assignments must adhere to MLA formatting. Your text, A Writer’s Reference, also has a great section on formatting in other disciplines, such as APA and Chicago Manual of Style.

SHORT ASSIGNMENTS

· You will be writing short answers, responses and analysis questions in response to the readings.

GRAMMAR EXERCISES

· We will be using your handbook, A Writer’s Reference, and the website

http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/writersref to understand and review grammar and style rules.

PARTICIPATION

CLASS DISCUSSIONS, GROUP WORK and PEER REVIEWS

In order to participate, you must be prepared. Short assignments, drafts for peer critiques, discussion questions etc. must be turned in on time.

Contribute regularly to class discussions with thoughtful comments that relate to the discussion and the readings. I will evaluate you on the content of your contributions (the relevance and insightfulness of what you say) rather than on the lengthiness of your input; therefore resist throwing in tangential or anecdotal experience that does not further the class discussion. This is not to say you must leave “I” out of your contributions. By all means, include personal reflection, but use it to draw connections and develop themes related to the discussion.

Your final grade will be evaluated as:

20% Essay 1

20% Essay 2

20% Essay 3

20% Short assignments and grammar exercises

20% Participation: class discussions, group work, peer reviews

STUDENT CONDUCT

My role is to provide structure for the class, evaluate your work and help you navigate the course material and the conventions of college-level writing. The expectations of you in this class are the same as they would be for any of your other responsibilities or commitments. Treat your academic work as you would your job. Complete work on time and participate often.

Plagiarism

Plagiarizing means using another's words or ideas and representing them as your own. It also means having someone write a paper or part of a paper for you and representing it as your own work. Bellevue College has a contract with a plagiarism detecting service and any work suspected of plagiarism will be referred to that service.

Plagiarism is grounds for failing the course and possible dismissal from school.

How to email me and turn in assignments

In an online course, you are expected to sign in to the course every weekday and participate regularly, just as you would in a face-to-face class.

Our work in this class is cumulative. This means that smaller assignments and daily activities are designed to build increasingly larger and more complex pieces of writing (the formal essays and projects.) So, if you miss small assignments and / or don’t sign in to the course for a long period of time, this will not only affect your participation grade, but will affect your formal essays and projects as well.

EMAIL:

Please use professional email format (PEF) when corresponding via email. You should use this format when emailing anyone with whom you have a professional relationship- instructors, coworkers, bosses, potential employers. An email composed in PEF has the following components:

An informative subject line
Dear __________,
State why you’re emailing
Give any further necessary information
Say thank you or something like it
Sign your name

If you are turning in an assignment via email, the subject line must contain your name, the class you are in, and the name of the assignment, in that order.

Emailed assignments MUST:

- Be sent as an attachment (don’t email me an assignment as the body of an email)

- Use an MS Word document (no open software, Works documents, or text-rich documents.)

o Bellevue College has several computer labs full of computers with this software. Make use of this resource if you don’t have Word on your computer.

- Contain a subject line with your name, the course number and the name of the assignment.

- Use a file name that has your name, and the name of the assignment (in that order)

- Not be a corrupted file

I will return your assignment if any of the above criteria isn’t met.

CONTACT

The best way to contact me is via email: elizabeth.harazim@bellevuecollege.edu

Make sure you sign up for a Bellevue College email account.

If you need assistance of any kind, email me. Please email me, too, if you are struggling, need clarification, or have questions about a direction to take your writing.

I’ve also put together a list of resources you can find across BC’s campus.

Look over that list to familiarize yourself with the departments and resources that are out there. Student success is directly correlated to access to and support with resources. I can help with access and support— make sure to let me know if you’re struggling so there’s no time lost in getting my assistance and / or connecting you with a department that can help you.

You will find the guide to BC Resources under the Getting Started tab.

Additional Notes:

A message from the Liberal Arts Department:

Essential to a liberal arts education is an open-minded tolerance for ideas and modes of expression that might conflict with one’s personal values. By being exposed to such ideas or expressions, students are not expected to endorse or adopt them but rather to understand that they are part of the free flow of information upon which higher education depends.

To this end, you may find that class requirements may include engaging certain materials, such as books, films, and art work, which may, in whole or in part, offend you. These materials are equivalent to required texts and are essential to the course content. If you decline to engage the required material by not reading, viewing, or performing material you consider offensive, you will still be required to meet class requirements in order to earn credit.