Syllabus (in-progress)

Dr. Roland Specht-Jarvis, LH 116
320 224 2341
rhspechtjarvis@gmail.com
This blog serves as an extended syllabus.
Theme of this class: Cultural Heritage: The Stories within.

Course ID: 002799 ENGL 191 22 Intro Rhetorcl/Analyt Wrt

The class meets one evening per week in MC 206 on Tuesdays from 5-8:20.

The class will require you to

            - keep track of the class blog at all times. Announcements appear there.

            - create your own google blog and tell the instructor the url.

            - name the blog en191s12+your name, e.g. en101s12RolandSpechtJarvis

            - I would appreciate if you would be willing to post a mug shot of your face on your blog. It would help me greatly since we only meet 15 times and I have over 100 students this semester.

We will use the first four meetings to address select writing problems, and create a new story from scratch: The Story in a Box. Students will read and evaluate each others blogs and stories throughout the semester. All your blogs and entries are due at noon of the day we meet: Tuesday (unless otherwise indicated). This class depends on active student participation and will reduce lectures to a minimum because they have shown not to sink in as well as peer-to-peer discovery. The instructor's explanations and suggestions will serve your own discovery more than anything else.

Book, resources, guidelines

Recommended book: Diana Hacker, Nancy Sommers, Rules for Writers, student edition, Bedfort/St. Martin's Boston-New York 2012

The course objectives

Reading, writing, and critical reasoning based on different text types and situations related to Global Cultures & Communications. We will explore the creative as well as analytical side of writing, discourse, and structure together. You will write short and longer papers and learn to edit your writing, improve your arguments, and become more effective communicators using blogs. All the while you will learn about other countries and cultures and explore the otherness of non-US speech, text, discourse and argument.

The semester will be structured as follows:

Part I: Five meetings January-February we will cover handouts, LEO and writing topics from the

University of Ottawa Writing Center.

Part II Preparing for interviews with class mates students, conducting interviews,

and writing interview and country reports. This will cover February until early April.

Part III You personal Final Project. This could be an additional interview with a "foreign" person not in class, a comparison of several interviews generated in this class, a research paper, or anything else we agreed on. The day of finals

is May 3. Your final project is due that day in your blog by 9PM. Please consider that

-- Several drafts are needed until a paper or presentation reads well .

-- Writing and researching improves as you allow others to critique your

work, and make editing suggestions to you.

-- If in doubt about a sentence, paragraph, or page of your text and its role for

the entire paper, just cut it out.

-- Less is usually more, if less was edited and revised intelligently.

-- Any text element in your paper that is not your own writing and expression,

needs to be referenced as the work or idea of others.

-- Use of technology cannot make up for lack of reflection and poor writing design.

-- You can only write about what you know; resist writing about things

you do not understand. 

Journal or Blog

You are expected to keep a google blog and paste any homework, presentations, and papers into new posts. If working in a group, state all members' names and the url totheir part of the presentation. Linking URLs is very easy in our working envirnment using gogle blogs (which we use because they are free, and allow all students to use the same page authoring design). Whenever you freewrite, list,

research, or keep records of books and urls used, paste it into your journal/blog. The journal is

supposed to show evidence of how you went about tasks, which books and

homepages you used, etc. Every time you search for a topic (e.g. www.google.com)

I require you to record and post the urls used and the date you visited that page. 

Use a word-processing program or an editor simultaneously with the browser to

keep records. Save your work to your personal disk, USB storage card,

or Husky account and keep a second copy in your google documents. If you do not complete homework from week to week, you cannot work effectively in class that day. 

A person without a correctly kept journal/blog (complete and timely posting) cannot achieve

better than a B even if everything else is A+.

Grades will be based on:

Completeness and appearance of blog 30%

Post assignments, homework, interviews 50%

Class participation, presentations 20%

Best paper (or post or interview) in class gives you a 10% bonus for the final grade on select tasks, as announced. Missing a meeting without talking with me ahead of time costs you 5% on the final grade. Missing more than 25% of total class time, by department policy, forces me to fail you in this class.