Because mastering writing
involves the skills of critically reading other essays as well as planning, organizing,
drafting, revising, and proofreading your own papers, this class will require many reading
assignments which will help you learn to read thoroughly for content, structure, and
adequate support.
Because the best way to understand a text is to identify the important passages or statements, such as the thesis statement or various topic sentences, to identify and evaluate the supporting data, to recognize the organizing principles of the structure, and to identify and understand the importance of all aspects of the essay’s arguments, you will be required to do a notetaking assignment on each work you read. You can choose your own method of notetaking: marking the text, highlighting important passages, using the margins of the text for your own notes, raising questions about issues in the text, or summarizing the important points on a separate piece of paper after reading the text. However you choose to takes notes, I would like to see a copy of those notes; I will assign points towards the subjective grade for each set of notes you take on the assigned texts.
To help you further understand the text and how the essay was structured, how supported, how made more interesting or effective, you will be required to produce teaching assignments on some of the texts. When it is your turn to teach a text, you should develop three to five questions about the text which will help your group understand the text better. Sample questions might include generic questions like the following: What is the thesis of the text? How it is organized and why is this an effective method of structuring the main points? How are the points supported and how convincing is the support? or Why would the teacher have assigned this particular text; what should be learn from this text about successful writing? You can also include questions which are specific to the text you are teaching, such as Why does Golding include the Einstein episode in his essay? or What does the elephant symbolize in Orwell’s essay?
To give you an opportunity to demonstrate that you have learned some helpful techniques of essay writing, you will be given five writing assignments. These will begin with easier kinds of writing, narrative and personal experience, and proceed to more difficult types of writing, such as analysis, argument, and literary criticism. For each assignment I will suggest some prewriting exercises you can do, but you are not required to use my techniques. You should write your rough draft as soon as you can to allow you time to set the draft aside for a time and then come back to revise it.
You will be evaluating each other’s papers and to help you I have developed some revision assignments. These will ask you to identify and evaluate the author’s thesis, structure, and support. Someone else in the class will be similarly evaluating your paper, so you should make sure you word your suggestions for improvement as constructive criticisms (the kind you would like to get on your own papers). When you have received criticism on your own paper, you can revise your paper before turning it in for a grade. Remember, one of the purposes of doing an evaluation of someone else’s paper is to learn how to objectively evaluate your own papers and determine what changes you would need to make to produce a better product.
In addition to the essays you will write for this class, you are also required to research and write a term paper. To help you to prepare for this sometimes daunting task, you will do some researching assignments: collect a working bibliography of possible sources to use for your term paper on a narrow and interesting topic, write a summary of an article you can use for your term paper, write a paraphrase of one to two paragraphs of another article, use quotes from a source correctly in a paragraph you write, and produce an annotated bibliography. I have spaced the deadlines for these tasks throughout the semester to keep you from procrastinating on the term paper, to get you working early and continuing to work on the term paper from the first few weeks of class.
When you have successfully accomplished all these assignments, you should be able to read essays critically (those professionally written and published as well as those of your classmates); write effective, interesting essays yourself; and research and synthesize critical material in writing a term paper using the correct MLA format for research papers.
