The principal objective of 110C is to prepare you to be an effective writer of the kinds of writing you will be called on to produce during your college careers, professional careers, civic actions, and personal and social lives. By the end of the course, you should be more mature in your understanding and use of language, should develop more efficient writing processes, should know the qualities of effective composition in a given rhetorical situation, and should be able to demonstrate those qualities in your own writing. By the end of the course, you should be able to...
Understanding of the following concepts will guide your future writing experiences...
Prerequisites
To be enrolled in English 110C you must pass the Writing Sample Placement Test.
For online participation, you need...
Readings will be retrieved from the World Wide Web.
Since you will not be meeting with a face-to-face class, you will be doing individual work (Responses) and/or collaborative work (Activities & Assignments) each week (See Calendar). Each week you will submit work Tuesday by the end of the day (11:30 pm) and Friday by the end of the day (11:30 pm).
Responses (300 points; 20 points each): Work that each student will do individually. Most Responses are designed to demonstrate what you understood from a reading, give you an opportunity to discuss what you did not understand from the readings (so the instructor can provide further instruction), your ability to apply what you have read, and provide feedback on other's drafts. Also you will get all credit for attending both Conferences and taking the Perry Library Research Fundamentals Quiz.
Activities (150 points; 25 points each): Work that students will collaboratively do with other students in the class. Activities often have the same goals as Responses, but the act of collaborative knowledge making often serves to enrich the learning experience.
Most of the Response and Activity work will be prompted by reading a text or, sometimes, watching a video or listening to a podcast. Access to these texts and videos are linked from the description of the Response and Activity that instructs you to "Read", "Watch," "Listen," or "Examine." Each page will provide a detailed description of what you will need to submit by the end of the day. Work will be submitted through the Google Classroom platform.
Use these smaller writing assignments to your advantage instead of treating them as "busy work." A lot of the work that you do for these smaller assignments can be used directly in the major assignments; therefore, you will want to take these assignments seriously. This also gives you an opportunity to get serious feedback from the instructor on your work-in-progress. So, just fulfilling these assignments will often result in twice as much work for you.
The instructor reserves the right to add additional minor assignments when it seems necessary for and beneficial to the students. The final grade scale will be adjusted accordingly.
Any work not received by the time the instructor grades submitted work will receive a grade of a zero.
The instructor reserves the right to grade any work prior to the due date and time if that work is submitted early. All grades on this work are final, and the work cannot be revised and resubmitted prior to the due date and time for a higher grade.
Each of you have five major assignments to complete.
Assignment #1: Literature Review (100 points): To prepare for the IMRAD Essay, you will do textual research on the writing/literacy-related topic you will be studying. Therefore, you will read and review at least five articles–three from popular texts and two from academic texts. This assignment gives you the opportunity to share your understanding of the textual research that you will do and get feedback on it before you use it in your IMRAD Essay. In a 1000 - 1500 word essay, you will summarize these texts and explain how they "speak" with each other–or explain how and in what ways they agree or disagree.
Assignment #2: Research Proposal (100 points): After you have chosen a writing or literacy-related problem/issue that you want to address, you will explain your current knowledge (based upon your experiences and the textual research you have done for the Literature Review), state and justify your research questions, and detail the primary research methods you will use to learn more about this issue for the IMRAD Essay.
Assignment #3: IMRAD Research Essay (200 points): Using the IMRAD format, you will write an essay posing research questions about the writing/literacy-related topic you studied, what you learned from other sources about this topic, how you conducted research, what you learned from your data and how the data answered your research questions, and what you think the data means.
Assignment #4: miniTED Talk (100 points): As a way of thinking how you would present your research to a different type of audience, for a different purpose, through a different media, you will produce a 5-minute TED Talk-like presentation. We will analyze the genre and audience of TED Talks to learn what the expectations for these presentations are and thus provide guidelines to compose your work.
Assignment #5: Course Concept Letter (50 points): You will write a letter to the instructor explaining what you have learned about the six course concepts and apply at least three of them to the work you did and the work you observed your peers doing.
Any student receiving a grade of zero on any major assignment for not completing the assignment will fail this section of English 110C. Any work not received by the time the instructor grades submitted work will receive a grade of a zero.
The instructor reserves the right to grade any work prior to the due date and time if that work is submitted early. All grades on this work are final, and the work cannot be revised and resubmitted prior to the due date and time for a higher grade.
Major Assignments, Responses and Activities
I will be looking for evidence of each student's progress towards coherent and effective work. More specifically I will be looking for evidence of...
Grade Scale
Your final grade (1,000 points) and assignments will be graded on the following point scale with the understanding that the instructor reserves the right to adjust this scale based on the students' performance throughout the semester. Any adjustments will 1) apply to the entire class and 2) never deny a student the grade that she/he earns based upon this posted scale.
A =92-100 %
A -= 90-91.9 %
B+ = 87-89.9 %
B = 82-86.9 %
B- = 80-81.9 %
C+ = 77-79.9 %
C = 72-76.9 %
C- = 70-71.9 %
D+ = 67-69.9 %
D = 62-66.9 %
D -= 60-61.9 %
F = 0-59.9 %
Due to the asynchronous, online nature of this course, there is no attendence grade. You will, however, be expected to complete all of your assigned work in a timely fashion. Incomplete or tardy work or work not submitted will impact your grade.
Electronica refers to technology-related issues.
You will be submitting all of your work through the Google Classroom. All work can be written in Google Documents or written in Microsoft Word and uploaded into the Google Classroom. For the Activities, you will have a folder created for you in which you may compose your work together. Activity work should be submitted by one team member on the Google Classroom.
If you are having any type of problem with the class, always contact the instructor–either by email or by phone. Although the instructor is judicious about when he checks these medias and responds to them, your correspondence, in most situations, will be answered within 24 hours. If you do not try to contact the instructor, any inactivity on your part will be your responsibility.
If you do not understand instructions, you do not want to email the instructor and write, "Can you explain Assignment #1 to me." Instead, explain to the instructor what you do understand and highlight the sentences or passages that are creating confusion. This helps the instructor understand what aspects of the instructions are creating confusion so that they can be explained or corrected.
You will want to establish a consistent email account that you will use throughout the entire semester. It is recommended that you work with your ODU gmail account. At the very least, you are required to forward your ODU mail to the account you use most because this is the email the instructor will use, especially since that is the account that Google Classroom "speaks" to. To get an ODU account go to ITS.
You are responsible for making sure that files and messages are successfully received by the instructor and your peers; other email providers cannot provide this security. Also you will want to be aware that most evaluated coursework will be returned via email; if you are concerned about other parties reading these messages (e.g., someone with whom you share your email account), please make alternate arrangements with the instructor.
When emailing the instructor make sure that you include a subject line that includes the nature of the email. For example, a subject line, like "assignment" is vague. Instead be specific and state whether it is an "assignment submission," "question about assignment," or "assignment problem."
Also use the priority setting appropriately; in other words, make your email message stand out when you really need to draw the recipient's attention to your message. Do not use the priority setting on your standard assignment submissions or for simple requests.
If you are not composing in Google Drive, backup your document files frequently. Keep your files on your home machine, flash drives or on the Google cloud. You can also email documents to yourself as a means of backing up your work. The excuse "I lost my only copy" is not a valid one. Some tips for protecting your work–and yourself–are:
Electronic media allows us some freedoms that print media does not allow. Consequently, it is also subject to abuse. Please be respectful of your peers throughout the semester by not displaying, viewing, or posting web pages, files, or emails that may make others uncomfortable. Violations of this respect can be considered harassment according to university policy and will be handled as such.
As per the University's Honor Code, you must do your own original work in this class–and appropriately identify that portion of your work which is...
The university defines plagiarism as follows:
“A student will have committed plagiarism if he or she reproduces someone else’s work without acknowledging its source; or if a source is cited which the student has not cited or used. Examples of plagiarism include: submitting a research paper obtained from a commercial research service, the Internet, or from another student as if it were original work; making simple changes to borrowed materials while leaving the organization, content, or phraseology intact; or copying material from a source, supplying proper documentation, but leaving out quotation marks. Plagiarism also occurs in a group project if one or more of the members of the group does none of the group’s work and participates in none of the group’s activities, but attempts to take credit for the work of the group” (pp. 8-9)
If you have doubts about whether or not you are using your own or others' writing ethically, legally, or correctly, ask the instructor. Follow this primary principle: If in doubt, ask. Be up front and honest about what you are doing and about what you have contributed to an assignment.
If you have a documented disability, make sure you register with Office of Education Accessibility (757. 683.4655). Students are encouraged to self-disclose disabilities that have been verified by the Office of Educational Accessibility by providing Accommodation Letters to their instructors early in the semester in order to start receiving accommodations. Accommodations will not be made until the Accommodation Letters are provided to instructors each semester. Once you do so, feel free to talk to the instructor about any special accommodations that you may need to fulfill the requirements of this course.
At the end of the semester, you will have an opportunity to evaluate the instructor and the course. This is very important for helping the instructor and the department assess the course. Please take the time at the end of the semester to do these online evaluations.