ENGLISH 300

 

 

Joe Glaser, CH 11, 745-5763

Joe.Glaser@wku.edu

 

Text: Andreas Lunsford, Easy Writer, Third Edition. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2006. ISBN: 0 312 44874 0

Course Design: We'll work with a number of essays and issues, many provided by fellow students. Grammar will be covered only as needed to work on style and mechanics issues as they come up in your writing. The class may involve some group work and oral reporting.

Your grades will be based on four writing assignments (40%), a research project (40%), and your scores on quizzes and exercises (20%). Late work will be penalized one letter grade for each class session without a valid excuse. If you pass all quizzes and get all exercises in on time, you qualify for a 5-point bonus toward your net average—enough to go from a B (85%) to a A- (90%). Academic dishonesty (plagiarizing or other forms of cheating) will bring a grade of zero for any assignment where it occurs. Note that that means zero on a hundred-point scale, as opposed to an ordinary F (55%).

Attendance Policy:  You are allowed three unexcused cuts. After that I'll want valid excuses. Anyone missing more than six classes without a cast-iron excuse  will be penalized five points per cut on his or her final average or asked to drop the class.

General Education Goals: This course fulfills the A.1. (Organization and Communication of Ideas) general education requirement at WKU.  The course will help you attain these general education goals and objectives:

1. The capacity for critical and logical thinking

2. Proficiency in reading, writing, speaking

The goals of the course are to introduce students to writing and reading in the academic disciplines, to give students advanced instruction and practice in writing and reading essays within those various disciplines, and to make students aware of how disciplinary conventions and rhetorical situations call for different choices in language, structure, format, tone, citation, and documentation.  Students will conduct investigations into writing conventions in their fields and receive advanced instruction in planning, drafting, arranging, revising, and editing discipline-specific essays.  Reading assignments stress how knowledge is made and reported in various disciplines.  Students learn how to evaluate primary and secondary sources for accuracy, authority, bias, and relevance and how to synthesize different points of view within their essays.

 

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