English 302 – Advanced Composition (Multidisciplinary) PDF

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English 302 – Advanced Composition (Multidisciplinary)
Sections B15 and B16 (online)
Summer Session B (8-week), Summer 2021

Instructor Information, Office Hours, and Contact Information:

Your Instructor: Paul Haspel...

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English 302 – Advanced Composition (Multidisciplinary) Sections B15 and B16 (online) Summer Session B (8-week), Summer 2021 Instructor Information, Office Hours, and Contact Information: Your Instructor: Paul Haspel Online Office Hours: Monday through Thursday, 3:00-4:00 pm, via Blackboard Collaborate Ultra or Zoom, or by appointment Office Phone: 703-993-1160 Cell Phone: 814-441-9387 (please, no calls before 10:00 am or after 7:00 pm) E-Mail: [email protected] Course Description: English 302 will teach you how to write with rhetorical awareness (interplay among audience, purpose, and context) and will help prepare you to understand how knowledge is created and transmitted in your field or discipline. You will learn about the following aspects of research and writing in your field of study:    

Recognizing key methods and conventions of scholarly research in your field or discipline; Articulating and refining your own question for scholarly inquiry; Situating your investigation in an ongoing context or conversation in your field; and Designing a final project that adds new perspectives to the conversation.

Advanced Composition will help you engage in scholarly inquiry as you work on narrowing a research question, and on engaging with your discipline or field of study. Composition Program Course Goals: By the end of this course, students will be able to do the following:      

Use writing as a tool for exploration and reflection in addressing advanced problems, as well as for exposition and persuasion; Employ strategies for writing as a recursive process of inventing, investigating, shaping, drafting, revising, and editing to meet a range of advanced academic and professional expectations; Identify, evaluate, and use research sources; Employ a range of appropriate technologies to support researching, reading, writing, and thinking; Apply critical reading strategies that are appropriate to advanced reading in your academic discipline, and in possible future workplaces; Recognize how knowledge is constructed in your academic discipline, and in possible future workplaces; 1

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Analyze rhetorical situations – audience, purpose, and context – of texts produced in your academic discipline, and in possible future workplaces; and Produce writing – including argument proposals – that is appropriate for a range of rhetorical situations within your academic discipline, and within possible future workplaces.

Students as Scholars Goals for English 302: This course participates in the Students as Scholars (SaS) program, a university-wide initiative that encourages undergraduate students to engage in scholarly research. Across campus, students now have increased opportunities to work with faculty on original scholarship, research, and creative activities, through their individual departments and through OSCAR (the Office of Student Scholarship, Creative Activities, and Research) (http://oscar.gmu.edu). At the end of the course, the Office of Institutional Assessment and the Composition Program will collect random samples of students’ final research projects in order to assess the effectiveness of the Students as Scholars Program. This assessment has no bearing on your grade in the course. Included in this syllabus are course goals and learning outcomes for the composition program and the SaS initiative. Students as Scholars Learning Outcomes: CORE: Articulate and refine a question, problem, or challenge. ETHICAL: Identify relevant ethical issues and follow ethical principles. DISCOVERY: Distinguish between personal beliefs and evidence. METHOD: Choose an appropriate research method for scholarly inquiry. METHOD: Gather and evaluate evidence appropriate to the inquiry. METHOD: Appropriately analyze scholarly evidence. CONTEXT: Explain how knowledge is situated and shared in relevant scholarly contexts. Course Prerequisites: Students must have completed or transferred in the equivalent of English 100/101, the Mason Core literature requirement, and 45 credit hours. Students should take a version of English 302 that is related to their major field. Please note that the Volgenau School of Engineering requires English 302-N of students enrolled in the following majors: Applied Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Statistics, and Systems Engineering. The Volgenau School requires either English 302-N or English 302-M of students enrolled in the following majors: Bioengineering, Civil Engineering, Cyber Security Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering. Volgenau students majoring in Information Technology may enroll in English 302-N, English 302-M, or English 302-B. 2

Students enrolled in any version of English 302 other than those listed above should contact their advisor immediately, in order to make sure that they are enrolled in the right course. General Education Requirement/Mason Core Statement: This course is part of the Mason Core (General Education) Program, which is designed to help students prepare for advanced work in their major field, and for a lifetime of learning – or, as the Mason Catalog puts it, to help develop “a Mason Graduate [who is] an engaged citizen, a well-rounded scholar, and someone who is prepared to act for the world”. For more information on the mission of The Mason Core, please consult the University Catalog or visit the Provost Mason Core page at http://provost.gmu.edu/general-education/ http://masoncore.gmu.edu GMU E-Mail Requirement: Students must activate their Masonlive account and check it regularly. For privacy reasons, all class-related e-mails will be sent only to students’ official GMU e-mail addresses. Required Textbooks and Materials: Susan Miller-Cochran, Roy Stamper, and Stacey Cochran, An Insider’s Guide to Academic Writing: A Rhetoric and Reader, second edition (Boston: Bedford/Saint Martin’s, 2019) The Insider’s Guide provides helpful general information on successful writing in a variety of disciplinary contexts. The following items will also be helpful to you, to facilitate your success in this course:    

Readings and handouts available on Blackboard (see “Readings and Blackboard”). Portable (e.g., flash drive) or online/cloud data storage containing current work for the course. An active Mason e-mail account that you check regularly. Per university policy, I will only send or respond to messages from your GMU e-mail account. A laptop or tablet with word processing capabilities for every class activity – something that is particularly important in the context of an online class. If you do not have one, and you are able to travel to GMU’s Fairfax campus, please contact me for a Netbook Check Out Card during the first week of the semester.

Blackboard and Other Course Tools:

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Blackboard will be the means by which you will access, and participate in the work of, the course. Mason’s Blackboard presence for this course, and indeed for all your courses, can be accessed at blackboard.gmu.edu. Methods of Instruction: Most class sessions of English 302 will be interactive and will involve a significant amount of student writing and discussion. Students may be asked to work individually as well as collaboratively as they investigate issues, practice writing strategies and techniques, learn research and critical-reading approaches, and review their own and their peers’ writing. Students who attend regularly and stay engaged in class activities, who keep up with all of the assignments, and who block off sufficient time each week for thoughtful drafting and revising usually succeed in this class. Completion Policy: Students must earn a C (73%) or higher to fulfill the ENGH 302 Mason Core requirement; students must complete all major projects to earn a C or higher. Course Requirements and Grading Percentages: Discipline Awareness Essay – 15% Research Proposal – 15% Annotated Working Bibliography – 5% Literature Review – 15% Oral Presentation – 5% Final Research Project – 25% Participation – 20% Percentage Breakdown of Final Grades:           

97.50 – 100% = A+ 93 – 97.49 = A 90 – 92.99 = A87.50 – 89.99 = B+ 83 – 87.49 = B 80 – 82.99 = B77.50 – 79.99 = C+ 73 – 77.49 = C 70 – 72.99 = C60 – 69.99 = D Below 60 = F

Major Assignment Grading Standards:

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An “A” grade (90-100%) marks an excellent essay that engages the reader in a provocative conversation. Even more than in a “B” essay, the writer anticipates and responds to possible reader questions, uses a wide range of supporting evidence, structures arguments and analyses to create a fluid reading experience, provides unexpected insights, and uses language with care and facility. A “B” grade (80-89%) represents a good essay, a strong example of college-level writing and thinking. Beyond meeting the “C” level requirements, the writer of a “B” essay goes further in some way(s); he or she demonstrates some insight into the “grey areas” of the topic, provides original or quite thorough support that is tightly woven into the overall argument, and/or creates prose that reads smoothly at both the sentence and the paragraph level. The essay has few sentence-level errors, and in most cases is likely to display a lively writer’s voice and/or style. A “C” grade (70-79%) constitutes a satisfactory essay and denotes competent college-level writing and achievement. The writer responds to the specified rhetorical situation: he or she meets, to some degree, all the assignment requirements, and employs some key strategies for communicating his or her ideas to his or her targeted audience. The essay has a central focus, presents some support, and moves from point to point in an orderly fashion; sentencelevel errors do not significantly interfere with reader understanding of the writer’s ideas. Essays that do not meet these criteria will not earn a “C.” A “D” grade (60-69%) or an “F” grade (0-59%) reflects an essay that fails to meet the basic expectations of the assignment.

Homework (Low-Stakes) Grading: Low-stakes work will be graded on a check-plus/check/check-minus/half-check/zero basis. A check-plus reflects excellent work – 5 out of 5 possible points. A check reflects good work – 4 out of 5 possible points. A check-minus reflects 3 out of 5 possible points. A half-check represents 2.5 out of 5 possible points. Description of Major Assignments: Major essay assignments should total at least 3500-4000 words of finished prose per student. DISCIPLINE AWARENESS ESSAY This assignment is designed to help you explore the discourse community of your field of study; the assignment will also help you map how scholars in the field “talk” to each other through their presentations and publications. Finally, the project will help you analyze how audience impacts disciplinary issues and concerns so that you learn how rhetorical awareness affects the decisions writers make.

PRELIMINARY ASSIGNMENTS FOR THE MAJOR RESEARCH PROJECT

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RESEARCH PROPOSAL The proposal will give you an opportunity to organize your ideas and present a viable plan of action as you work towards collecting sources for the literature review. The research proposal will help you gain clarity about your audience, something that in turn will help you focus the scope of the literature review.

ANNOTATED WORKING BIBLIOGRAPHY The annotated working bibliography will help you collect and summarize your data. It will be an important component of your research, and it will help you keep track of the most relevant sources for your literature review. You will be required to summarize and evaluate five to seven sources. The sources may be a mix of scholarly and other sources.

LITERATURE REVIEW The literature review builds from the annotated working bibliography to provide a formal setting-forth of your sense of the state of knowledge in the field that you have chosen for your research project. Organizing as you choose – narrative history of ideas, setting-forth of major schools of thought – you analyze and summarize what has been said, to date, in your field. In the process, you also make clear where you see “gaps” in the research – issues that have not yet been addressed, and where you could use your own research to address those research gaps and move the conversation forward.

ORAL PRESENTATION This brief oral presentation is designed to function as an informal progress report. You will share your research question, how it is evolving, the arguments, counterarguments, and positions your research has yielded, and your plan to focus the scope of the literature review. This presentation is scheduled before the draft of the major research assignment is due, but after a significant portion of the research has been completed. It will help you articulate your ideas and finalize your plan of action as you begin drafting the final project.

RESEARCH ESSAY The research essay is a major assignment of this course. You will be required to argue a point based on evidence, and you will be able to address some of the objections, concerns, and counterarguments that are related to your major claim and may be held by the target audience. The essay will be oriented to a specific, researchable audience,

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one that should be defined and refined as the semester progresses. The essay will include a mix of current scholarship and professional sources. Moreover, the final research assignment will be recursive in nature. It will combine your three prior essays from the semester – the discipline awareness essay, the research proposal, and the literature review – with the results, findings, and discussion from your additional research. At semester’s end, consequently, you will have a major research essay that not only will earn you (I hope) a very good grade, but also will serve as a very fine writing sample to present, as an example of your work, when you are applying for admission to graduate school, or for a job in your chosen career field. Submitting Your Work: Major assignments will be submitted electronically, to a portal in Blackboard that I will establish for each major assignment. It is your responsibility to make sure that your work has been successfully submitted for each major assignment. “I didn’t know that it didn’t get there” is not an acceptable excuse. George Mason University’s grading policies do not allow for final grades to be changed based on the student’s submission of work that had been missing as of the time when final grades were submitted. Saving Your Work: It is of the highest importance that you save all of your work for the course – whether through a flash drive or thumb drive, on your computer’s hard drive, via the cloud, through Dropbox, or by some other means. Indeed, it is best to save your work in two different ways, in case one of these modes for saving one’s work malfunctions. Late Work Policy: In accordance with Composition Program requirements, students are offered three oneday crisis passes. Each crisis pass gives a student one extra day (24 extra hours) on any assignment, whether homework or major project, without penalty or explanation. Crisis passes may be used individually, or all at once. Students are not required to notify the instructor in advance when using a crisis pass. Beyond the period covered by the crisis passes, late work in the case of major assignments may be penalized by up to a 5% to 10% grade deduction per calendar day of continued lateness. In the case of homework and other relatively low-stakes assignments, late work beyond the period covered by the crisis passes will receive half credit. Class Participation and Engagement: Class participation, in the context of this class, refers to meaningful, active, engaged participation in any given class activity. Mere nominal presence in an online class

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activity is not enough. Class participation and engagement, for any class activity, is scored on an all-or-nothing basis. In accordance with standard Composition Program policy, students will be given the equivalent of one week of “free” absences. In practice, this specification means that students will not lose points for their first week’s worth of missed class activities. Student participation grades will be updated in Blackboard at least every two weeks. Inclement Weather/Class Cancellation Policy: GMU’s policies for inclement weather and class cancellation can be found at https://universitypolicy.gmu.edu/policies/inclement-weatheremergency-closure/. Of greatest relevance for our class, please be aware that University policy dictates that any decision to delay opening or close the university in response to anticipated inclement weather on any particular day is supposed to be made by 5:00 am that day, in order to facilitate the timely dissemination of that information to the entire University community. This information will be distributed to the university community via the University homepage, Blackboard, Mason Alert, and the University’s Information Center (703-9931000), and to media outlets throughout Northern Virginia and the rest of the Washington, D.C., area. Revision Policy: All students will have the option to revise at least one major project after they have received a grade. Indeed, revision will be allowed on all major projects that do not come due at or near the end of the semester. If you wish to revise a major project, then a revision conference is required. You have two weeks, after receiving a graded major project, to meet with me or schedule a revision conference. After the revision conference, a student will have until the end of the semester to submit his or her revision. The one restriction is that students may not submit more than one revision at a time. Composition Program Statement on Plagiarism: Plagiarism means using words, opinions, or factual information from another source without giving that source credit. Writers give credit through the use of accepted documentation styles, such as parenthetical citation, footnotes, or endnotes; a simple listing of books, articles, and websites is not sufficient. This class will include direct instruction in strategies for handling sources as part of our curriculum. Yet students in composition classes must also take responsibility for understanding and practicing the basic principles listed below. To avoid plagiarism, meet the expectations of a U.S. academic audience, give readers a chance to investigate an issue further, and make credible arguments, writers must 8

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Put quotation marks around, and give an in-text citation for, any sentences or distinctive phrases (even very short, 2- or 3-word phrases) that writers copy from any outside source, such as a book, textbook, article, website, newspaper, song, hockey card, interview, encyclopedia, CD, YouTube video, movie, etc.; Completely rewrite – not just switch out a few words – any information they find in a separate source and wish to summarize or paraphrase for their readers, and also give an in-text citation for that paraphrased information; Provide an in-text citation for any facts, statistics, or opinions that the writers learned from outside sources (or that they just happen to know) and that are not considered “common knowledge” in the target audience (new research may be required in order to locate a common outside source to cite); and Provide a new in-text citation for each element of information – that is, do not rely on a single citation at the end of a paragraph, because that is not usually sufficient to provide a reader with clear information regarding how much of the paragraph comes from an outside source.

Writers must also include a Works Cited or References list at the end of their essay, providing full bibliographic information for every source cited in their essay. While different disciplines may have slightly different citation styles, and different instructors may emphasize different levels of citation for different assignments, writers should always begin with these conservative practices un...