Discovering Ideas

English Composition Spring 2009 Palomar College

Frequently Asked Questions

On-line Course 


1.    Required Work

        How much reading is required for the course?
        How much writing is required for the course?
        Will we be doing group work ?  
        

2.     On-line work
        How much computer expertise do I need to take this course?
        How much time will we have to spend on-line?
        Will we post our work on the Internet?

3.    Topics and format

        What's a working draft?
        What topics will we write on?
        What is the format for essay?
        What about grammatical and spelling errors?
        Can we rewrite essays?
        Will we write a research paper?

4.    Grading and evaluation

        How will we be graded?

5.    Penalties

        What are the penalties for late work?
        What are the penalties for plagiarism or falsifying evidence?

6.     Miscellaneous    

        Can we throw away our materials after the essay is finished?
        Do we need to own a dictionary?
        Can we come in during office hours?


Required Reading

You are required to read major portions of five textbooks for the class.  In parentheses after each book is the abbreviation that I will use to refer to it, usually the authors' last names or initials: 

          The Discovering Ideas Handbook, linked to our class home page (DIH). 

The first four you will be required to buy and to own until after the semester is over. (You will not be able to substitute another handbook for Kirszner and Mandell. You need to own your own copy of the book. There is no other way to get through the class. Please do not take this course if you are unwilling to buy the books.) The last book is published on the Internet and you may access it there. This course is definitely reading-intensive.  There will be over 500 pages of required reading for the course, not counting your own research.  For further information about the books, see the Books page.

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Required Written Work

The required work consists of the following:

  1. Four essays, with a total of no less than 6,000 words. For each essay you will submit at least one working draft and a revised essay. Each working draft must be a minimum of 1,000 words of text (that means that the body of the essay--the paragraphs excluding title, other material before the first paragraph, and list of works cited--must be at least 1,000 words.)  Each revised essay must be a minimum of 1,500 words of text. Each of your essays will be published on the Internet.  You may also revise each of these essays further, and most of you will do so.  The requirement of 6,000 words a minimum required to make this a transferable course, so it is firm and non-negotiable.
  2. Responses to discussion questions on discussion topics on the Blackboard discussion site.  The discussion will be heavier at some times than others, but on average you should be contributing a minimum of 50 words per week to the on-line discussion.  That is a minimum.  Most of you will contribute much more than that.
  3. Reviews on your own and other essays.  You will do peer review of every working draft and every essay you write.
  4. A portfolio of your work consisting of a minimum of 4,000 words of text. It may consist of revised or expanded versions of some or all of your essays.  In other words, you have a great deal of freedom in deciding what your portfolio will consist of. Your essays and your final portfolio will be published on the Internet.  Assignments will be described in more detail below and elsewhere. The point here is that you must complete all of the assignments in each of these categories in order to pass the course.

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Group Work

You will be assigned to an editorial group during our orientation meeting.  You will be doing a great deal of work with this group and with other students in the class.  You will review one another's essays, discuss the readings with one another, sometimes to respond as a group, and will have other group projects to do.  Your editorial group will be your support system and sounding board for ideas that you want to try out on someone before putting them in an essay and posting them on the Internet.  Group work is an absolutely essential part of the course; you can't avoid it.  You need the help of others to become a better thinker and a better writer, none of us can do it on our own. 

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On-Line Work

If you are taking this course, you already have some familiarity with the Internet and you know how to send and receive an e-mail message.  Some of you know a great deal more than that about the technology of the Internet (some of you know a great deal more than I do about it), some of you are relative beginners.  In either case, you will be doing some new things this semester. Don’t worry about this. If you have worked with computers very little in the past, it isn’t a problem. If you are having problems understanding how to do something I will be happy to help you or to get you in touch with the staff of Palomar's Academic Technology Group who can do so.  You will need to be responsible, however, for maintaining your Internet connection in good working order.  If your problem is with your Internet Service Provider (ISP) or your own hardware, you will need to handle it through the proper maintenance channels.

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Time on-line

The amount of time you need to spend on-line will vary.  Most of your work for the class can be done off-line: reading, research, writing.  Almost all of the reading assignments can be done away from a computer if you print them out.  But you will have to spend some time on-line every day to be successful in the class.  You need to monitor your e-mail daily, to find our whether you have mail that is relevant to the class.  When I send you e-mail, I will expect to hear back soon unless you have indicated that you will be out of touch for some reason.  You owe the other students in the class the same courtesy.  You will be required to send me at least one e-mail message each week, no matter what else is going on.  You will hear more about this in the Syllabus and elsewhere, but remember that I will need to receive e-mail from you every week.  

Overall, the class will take a lot of your time--for most students, ten to fifteen hours a week at least.  But you don't need to spend most of that time on-line.  You do, however, have to check in frequently to find out what's going on, and you will have to send a minimum of one e-mail message a week, every week.  In some weeks, of course, you will send and receive a lot of e-mail.

If you have technical problems that keep you from responding to your e-mail for longer than a day, you need to let me know what the problem is right away, and when you expect to resolve it.  If you can't use a computer to contact me over the Internet, use the telephone.  I have voice mail that works 24 hours a day. I check my messages several times a day, even on weekends.  There is absolutely no reason that you ever need to be out of touch.

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Posting Your Work

Unlike in some English classes, the work you do in this class will be published.  Specifically, your essays will be posted on the Internet so that they will be publicly available to anyone who wants to read them.  Your final portfolio will remain a permanent part of the class archive.  And people do read them.  Many Internet search engines, such as Google and Hot Bot, will pick up your essays in keyword searches.  I have received mail from instructors at other colleges to let me know that they have used essays from our class page as reading assignments in their classes.  One of my former students was interviewed on a local television program when a reporter turned up her essay on an unusual topic in an Internet search.  You shouldn't worry about everybody seeing your work as soon as it's done.  But you also shouldn't think that what you write for this class is some sort of classroom exercise that is private and secret.  It isn't.  You are writing to real people, and real people will read what you write.

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Working Drafts (WD)

You will submit at least one working draft of each of your essays before the revised essay is due. A working draft should be a complete essay, but not necessarily a finished one. The minimum length for a working draft will be 1,000 words.  That is 500 words shorter than the minimum length of a revised essay, but it is a firm minimum.  If you have not really written enough for your fellow students to give you feedback on, the working draft is a waste of time.  Calling the second draft of the essay "revised" should not be taken to mean that a working draft should not be revised. 

Keep in mind that a working draft is supposed to be a work in progress. You are not necessarily supposed to be fully satisfied with it. That's why it's called a working draft. Indeed, you have met all of the requirements of the course if you submit a very “bad” working draft, in the sense that you end up using very little of it in your revised essay. The working draft is a step in the process of developing a finished essay. You have not failed in any way if your working draft is deeply flawed as an essay. You have failed completely if you don’t submit a working draft by the time it is due. It is an essential step in the process of developing an essay. Skipping that step is not an option. The working draft is required work. So remember: It doesn’t have to be "good," but it does have to be here, on the screen, when due.  You don't have the option of skipping the working draft and simply procrastinating until the revised essay is due.

One of the major reasons for assigning working drafts is that they get you started on the essay in time to do a decent job.  But if this strategy is to work, you need to take the working draft seriously.  The working draft you submit should be a serious effort to say something important.  If it is something you throw together the night before it is due, it will be of limited value.  But limited value or not, it's still required.

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Theme of the Course

The theme of the course is "Discovering Ideas." It is intended to emphasize that the major task of writing is discovering ideas and conveying them to others. The theme is intended to be broad and allow you to choose from a wide variety of topics and approaches for your essays. But it will also allow us to pursue a common understanding in our discussions and reading. While developing your ideas you will also be learning about the ideas and assumptions your fellow students bring to the topic. In doing so, you will be learning about the audience for your writing, because these are the same people you will be writing essays to.  Each of the four essays will have a very general subject area.  You will write on a very specific topic within that general subject.  The subject areas for the fours essays will be Learning, Thinking and Knowing, Moral Right and Wrong, and Technology.

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Format for Working Drafts and Essays

In this class, you will submit your working drafts and essays in Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML).  HTML is the set of conventions that allows different browsers, such as Firefox and Internet Explorer, to consistently present text and graphic images over the Internet.  The document you are reading now was prepared in HTML, as was everything else you see on the Internet.  These days, it is very simple to prepare an HTML document.  In general, you will just type the essay in your word processing program as you normally would and then save it as HTML or a Web page.  This will be no problem unless you have a very old word processing program.  If you have a problem here, we will discuss it individually. 

There are a couple of differences between the format for HTML documents and for word-processed documents that you hand in on paper.  The following are the most important:  

The reason for these differences lies in the difference between reading something on a screen and reading on paper.

One more requirement for the format of all your essays is not covered in your book.   I will ask you, for all working drafts and essays, to put your thesis statement at the very end of the essay, after the last paragraph, and after the list of works cited if you have one.  So the last thing at the end of your essay, separated from the previous material by at least one blank line, should be the heading "Thesis Statement:"  followed by the thesis statement for that essay.  You will read about the rationale for this requirement in DIH 1.4 The Thesis Statement.

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Corrections

Some of you may think of an English composition class as primarily a "grammar" course. This, as you have probably already figured out, is a mistake. Grammar is a small part of writing, and one that you have already learned most of what you need to know about. (If you hadn't, you wouldn't be in this course.) However, we all make some technical mistakes in writing that get in the way of clearly transmitting our ideas to our readers. One of your goals this semester is to get better at freeing your writing from these distractions and to learn the conventions of standard English where you are unfamiliar with them. The way you will address this goal is by correcting the technical mistakes you do make. You will be required to correct all of the grammatical and mechanical errors that I find and mark in your essays. I may sometimes ask you to submit corrections of some errors to me as well as making them in your essay.  Our textbook and on-line resources are excellent, and if you use them as instructed you should find that most corrections will come easily, and the whole process will get easier as the semester goes on. I will be happy to answer your questions and to meet with you at any point in the process to go over problems or discuss questions you may have.  Trained tutors are available to assist you both in the Writing Center (S-1 and S-3) and in the Tutorial Center on the bottom floor of the Library.

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Rewrites

You may rewrite your essays if they were handed in on time. Before rewriting an essay you must complete  corrections of the errors I or your peer reviewers have found in the essay. Before beginning to rewrite an essay, you must submit a proposed thesis statement for the rewrite and discuss it with me. And if you intend to rewrite an essay you must set a date for submitting the rewrite.  I will be very flexible in accepting the dates you set for rewrites.  But I have found in the past that it is very easy to intend to do a rewrite, but often very difficult to actually produce one.  It takes time.  Some people have an unfortunate tendency to overestimate the amount of work they can do in the future.  I have had students try to rewrite three essays in the last two weeks of the semester.  Not one of them has done a very good job of it.  It just doesn't work to postpone all of your work to the end.  You won't get it done that way. You need to schedule the work so that you have a chance to really get it done.  You may submit only one rewrite at a time. Late essays cannot be rewritten.  You should only rewrite essays that you plan on submitting in your portfolio.  Your goal is to produce the best portfolio you can.

A "rewrite," of course, can be anything from small changes in a few paragraphs to a completely different essay.  You have a great deal of freedom.   I want you to do the best work you can in the time available.  The rewrite policy is intended to allow you to do that.  

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Research

In some English 100 classes you are required to write a separate research paper, longer than the others.  In this class, we will write fewer papers, all of the same minimum length.  However, research skills and using evidence well is a major emphasis of the class.  Given the subjects we will be writing about, you will have difficulty writing good essays if you don't do background research.  So you will be required to use at least three outside published sources in each of your four essays. That means that you will have to use at least three sources that were not assigned as reading for the class for every essay.  You may, of course, use sources that we did read for class as well.  And three is a minimum; you will often use many more sources than that.  Don't think of it as an upper limit on your research.  Work published on the Internet, of course, counts as a published source. 

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Grades

You will receive an evaluative grade of your work in the course at the end of the semester, as you do in all of your credit courses at Palomar College. If it were up to me, I would not give A-F grades but would have your work assessed publicly by outside parties. But it is not up to me, so I will give you a grade at the end of the semester as is currently required by Palomar College.

In deciding how to handle grading, as in deciding most other things about the course, I have been guided by the Purposes of the Course. The purpose of this course is primarily to develop your skills and abilities, not your transcript. What you learn, especially what you learn about how to learn in the future, will stay with you much longer and influence your life much more powerfully than will your grade in the course. But it is also true that you have a right to a reasonable assessment of your work in the end. With these two points in mind, we will handle grades as follows.

First, because what you learn in the course will depend on what you do in the course, in order to qualify for a passing grade ("C" or higher) you must complete all of the required work in the course, described in Required Written Work. The course consists of what you do; if you are to be a full participant in the course, you need to do all the work.

Second, in evaluating the quality of the work of those who complete it all, I will chiefly be guided by the quality of your final portfolio. But I will also consider how well and actively you have participated both in activities involving the whole class and in your specific editorial group.  Your semester grade will be calculated in roughly the following way.  These percentages are just approximations to give you a general idea of the relative importance of different kinds of work.  Since I a never assign numerical points to your work, the percentages can't be taken literally.

I will give narrative evaluations of each essay you submit. We will discuss each essay, either by e-mail or in person. You will evaluate each of your essays yourself, using the Essay Self-evaluation, and I will evaluate your essay according to the same criteria.  We will examine your writing and your responses from your audience, and I will give you detailed comments and advice. I will not, however, give you a letter grade. The reason is that to give you a letter grade tells you nothing at all about how to improve your work, but it does treat the work as finished, over. As you will see in Rewrites, your essays are not finished until you decide they are. You may revise your work as much and as often as you like. If you are still working on a piece, a letter grade is not a very useful bit of information; it tells you nothing at all about how to revise it further. Once you have decided that a piece is finished and that you will include it in your final portfolio, I will be happy to give it a grade. But after I have done so, you can no longer revise it and must include it in your portfolio. In other words, before I give you a letter grade, a final assessment, on a piece of work, you must decide that it is in its final form. So if you want to know the letter grade on some part of your portfolio, you must complete it, post it on the homepage, and request a grade. I do not recommend that you do this before the end of the semester unless you are quite sure that your work is as good as you can make it. I will be happy to discuss the quality of your work with you at any point; you will not need to get a letter grade in order to find out how you are doing in the class. But if you want to be graded before the end of the semester, I will grade your work as soon as you commit yourself to it.

Third, what are the criteria I will use in assigning grades to your writing? I will ask this question: Does the writer succeed in moving his or her readers to accept a serious and important thesis?  To see the criteria for a successful essay spelled out in more detail, see the Essay Self-evaluation.

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Penalties for Late Work

This class has deadlines, and your ability to succeed in the course depends on your ability to do your work when it is due.  We will always do something with your essays. We will always do something with your essays. As will become clear to you very soon, you will spend a good deal of time responding to the work of other writers in class and revising your own work in reaction to the responses of your fellow writers. If your work isn’t available to respond to, it doesn’t work. If more than one or two people are late with a given assignment, the whole system breaks down. For this reason, the penalties for late work are severe. I don't like to impose them. They are intended as a deterrent. On-line work will be considered late if it is submitted after the time the assignment is due. Notice that working drafts are considered just as important as final essays. A late working draft will affect your grade the same way as a late essay.

Late papers may not be rewritten. And they must be included in your final portfolio as-is. If either the working draft or the final essay is late, you may not rewrite the essay after it is done. Any work handed in on time can be redone and revised as much as you like, and you always have the option of omitting it from your final portfolio. That means that it makes more sense to submit a really lousy paper on time than to keep working on it past the deadline and hence make it late. If you submit it, no matter how bad it is, you can always fix it. But if it’s late, you can never do anything to improve it or to make up the penalty. 

Your first unexcused late paper--working draft or revised essay--will lower your final semester grade in the course by a full letter grade, in addition to the result of the inability to revise the paper.

If you submit more than one working draft or essay late, your final semester grade will be lowered by two full letter grades. If you submit more than two late working drafts or essays late before the drop deadline, you will be dropped from the course, or if it is too late to drop, your final semester grade will be lowered by three full letter grades.

E-mail assignments: Five late responses to e-mail assignments will lower your semester grade by a full letter grade. If you have more than seven, I would recommend that you drop the class.

There are, of course, genuine emergencies. If you are unable to submit work on time because of circumstances beyond your control, get in touch with me immediately--before the work is late if possible, but as soon as you can in any case. I will waive the penalties in appropriate cases. The burden of proof is on you to show that a given case is "appropriate."

These penalties are severe. But they are not as severe as the penalty you will impose upon yourself if you let yourself fall behind. It is very difficult to catch up in this course if you fall behind. You will often have to submit imperfect work, especially working drafts that you aren't happy with, in order not to have late work. That's fine. Indeed, I want you to submit imperfect work, so that we can help you to improve it. You are not required to be a genius or to only submit brilliant essays. You are required to submit a piece of work when it is due, not later.  Please take deadlines seriously.   More students drop or fail this course because they didn't complete their work when it was due than for any other reason.  And so far this has been a more serious problem in on-line classes.  Don't take chances.  Keep up.  There will never be a better time to do the work that is due than when it is due.  It may seem as if there will be, but it is an illusion.  Don't fall behind.

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N. Class Participation

We will be using e-mail and the Blackboard discussion site and communication tools to conduct on-line discussions.  Discussion will be informal and low-pressure. As we get to know each other better, it will get easier and even more interesting. But you will need to participate. Be prepared to do so.  In addition, you will need to meet with the other members of your editorial group at least once a week.  You will probably choose to do so using a chat room, but you are welcome to meet in person or by conference call if you can arrange it.  Likewise, you will be required to respond to one another’s essays. In other words, you will have several different modes in which you may engage in the ongoing class discussion. The more fully you participate, the more you will enjoy the class and the more you will learn.

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Plagiarism and Falsification of Evidence

To plagiarize is to intentionally represent what someone else wrote as your own work. For example, if you were to copy a portion of a published article in your essay without indicating that the material was quoted, you would guilty of plagiarism. If you were to submit a paper written by someone else and put your name on it, you would be guilty of plagiarism.

To falsify evidence is to represent what you have written as the work of someone else. For example, if you were to attribute a statement to an "expert," real or imagined, which you yourself had written, you would be guilty of falsifying evidence.

If you either plagiarize or falsify evidence on a piece of work you hand in for this class, even once, you will receive a grade of "F" for the course.

However, this should not be necessary because we are using the Safe Assign system, and on-line review mechanism that will check each of your essays for plagiarism and incorrect use of quotation marks.  You will be required to submit each of your revised essays to Safe Assign.  (This isn't optional; I won't read any essay until I have the Safe Assign originality report on it.)  The system is easy to use.  And it will help you to correct errors you may have made in your essays.  For example, if you have used a quotation but accidentally left out the quotation marks or failed to indent correctly, Safe Assign will point this out.  Then you will be able to correct the problem and resubmit the essay.  It makes it impossible for you to submit a plagiarized essay or one with significant errors.  And so it completely removes any incentive for inapporpriate "borrowing" of material in your essays.

In this connection, make sure you understand clearly the conventions governing quotation marks and indentation. They are clearly described in your handbook. Please note that parenthetical citations do not indicate that the material preceding them is quoted. Parenthetical citations only indicate the source of your information. That information may be quoted directly or it may be paraphrased. The only way to tell is by the presence or absence of quotation marks (or indentation for a longer quotation). So if you present a sentence from a magazine article and follow it with a correct citation but do not use quotation marks, you are guilty of plagiarism. If you have any questions about when quotation marks are needed, ask them.

Citations are covered in The Wadsworth Pocket Handbook, 32.  The conventions governing quotations are covered in 20.

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Rough Drafts and Research Materials

I may sometimes ask you to submit all of the drafts that you have generated in producing an essay or your research notes. Save all of your rough drafts and research notes for all of your essays until after the end of the term. Do not throw them away or lose them. Some of your work will be on your computer, of course. You can save this by backing it up on a floppy disc.

If I ask to see your research materials we will have to make some arrangements for you to get them to me.  If this should happen, you need to get copies of the materials to me as quickly as possible. If, at the end of the term, I have requested research materials and you have not produced them, I will assign you a grade of "Incomplete" until you produce the research materials requested. If you do not produce those materials within one year, your grade will automatically become an "F."

Not only because you might need to submit your drafts, notes, or research materials, but also because you may want to refer to them again later in the semester, adopt a clear policy at the beginning of the semester that you will not throw away anything of substance from this class. One technique that many students have adopted is to get a good-sized cardboard box, label it "DI" or "English 100," and toss all of their old drafts and discarded notes in the box. That way, if you need to dig out notes you used for your first essay, you will always know where to look. After the semester is over, you can toss it. If roommates, spouses, parents, children or other interlopers have access to your work area, caution them not to throw away your school work. And for computer work, always back up your work, all your work, to a floppy disc, every time you work on it.

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Dictionary

In addition to your textbooks, you will need to own a recent, hardback college dictionary.  This would be a dictionary published since 1990.  A good college dictionary is simply and essential tool in doing serious reading and writing.  If you don't have one, get one.  I recommend the American Heritage College Dictionary, 3rd or 4th edition; Merriam-Webster's Tenth Collegiate Dictionary; or the Random House College Dictionary.

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Office Hours

My office hours are posted on my door and on our class Web page.  Anyone from any class is free to send e-mail or come into the office.  If you would like to go over your last essay or discuss your next one in person rather than by e-mail, please feel free to come into the office.  Feel free to come in just to talk about how the class is going.  It is probably a good idea that you make an appointment by phone or e-mail when possible. Of course, feel free to just drop by the office; I'd be happy to talk with you whenever I'm not busy with someone else.  If you can't get in to campus easily, consider using the telephone.  It is often much more efficient to have a phone conversation than an e-mail or chat room talk.  I would be happy to schedule a telephone conversation with you if you would like.

I generally check my e-mail several times throughout the day, and I will always try to respond to your e-mail as quickly as I can.  I will be slower, sometimes much slower, to respond to your e-mail Friday through Sunday than I will Monday through Thursday.  

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On-line Discovering Ideas Table of Contents
On-line Syllabus

On-Campus Discovering Ideas Table of Contents
On-Campus Syllabus

Discovering Ideas
Palomar College
jtagg@palomar.edu
This page was last edited: 01/12/09