How the course will work

Instructional Tasks

This course has been adapted for online instruction. All of the key skills and activities are the same as in the in-person course. An advantage is that you will be able to do most of the work online according to your own time schedule. Our weekly Zoom meetings on Thursday mornings from 9:00 - 11:00 will be for instruction and to answer questions on that week's topic, review responses to weekly readings, practice exercises to illustrate the main instructional points, sharing your own writing as well as critique and help edit the work of classmates. Although we may never meet in person, I hope to build an online relationship with each of you and perhaps with each other. Each week there will be four primary tasks for you to complete.

Instructional Activities - This will be the main focus of our Zoom meetings. There will be a page each week that will include the instructional content. This will include discussion of Weekly Quotes, reflections on the readings, grammar points, practice exercises, sharing of compositions, and peer editing. There will also be time to answer any questions as a group or individually. The instructional content will be posted after each Zoom meeting, so there is no need to take detailed notes or to worry if you are late or forced to miss a Zoom session.

Quote of the Week - In addition to assigned readings, you are encouraged to read and listen to good, topical language from a variety of information and entertainment sources. Each week you are expected to identify and post on our class’s Canvas Discussion at least one quotation that you think is particularly interesting and well crafted. It may come from an article, book, film, song, or just something you hear on the street. The purpose of this task is to help you become more aware of interesting, well crafted language all around us. You are expected to read the quotes classmates post and are invited to comment if you find one that particularly moves you.

Reflections on Readings - There will be assigned readings each week. There is no required textbook, so all readings will be available online through the class Canvas site. Unfortunately, many of these have advertisements which I hope you can ignore. Instructional readings are for your information. Literary readings are examples of good writing. Poetry is to illustrate the beauty of thoughtful word-craft.

You are expected to respond in writing to the weekly literary reading. This will provide practice in Reflective writing. Responses should be thoughtful, but brief (100-200 words). A prompt will be provided to guide your response, but the real goal is for you to practice expressing your ideas clearly in writing. Feel free to digress from the prompt if so moved.

Composition Projects - The heart of the course is to learn how to organize your ideas into thoughtful, coherent, elegant essays. These projects will be relatively short and focus on a specific rhetorical style or strategy. We will explore seven different essay forms: Narrative, Description, Summary, Comparison, Procedure, Persuasion, Research. Knowing these forms will enable you to successfully construct any kind of future writing task. In general, each essay will be on a two week cycle, the first to draft, the second to revise.

Weekly Syllabus

Course Weekly Schedule
Week

Instructional Topic

Writing Project

Introduction/Mechanics/Assessment

Narrative

Audience and Voice

Narrative Revision

Figurative Language

Description

Idioms and Wordplay

Description Revision

Summarizing and Paraphrasing

Summary

Source Evaluation

Summary Revision

Comparing and Contrasting

Compare/Contrast

Analogies

Compare Contrast Revision

Process Analysis

Procedure

Organizing Information

Procedure Revision

Making Your Point

Persuasion

Using Data

Persuasion Revision

Research Paper

Citations/Style Manuals

Research Paper Revision

Putting It All Together

A word about Writing Mechanics

Many students lack confidence about writing mechanics. People who learned English orally as children, "hear" correct grammar rather than memorize rules and often know much more than they think. Some of us are poor spellers, create awkward sentences, or confuse punctuation. While learning rules of grammar is important, it will not necessarily make you a good writer. However, writing does need to be error and mistake free to make it easy to read and understand.

An error is something you don’t know or fully understand. Even well educated people will occasionally make grammatical, spelling, and punctuation errors. The teacher’s job is to correct errors.

A mistake is something you know, but fail to use correctly. Mistakes are generally easier to correct because you know what you should have done. However, it is not unusual to find mistakes from time to time even in published books. Avoiding mistakes is usually just a matter of careful proofreading. The student’s job is to avoid mistakes.

Grammar Police ImageKeep in mind that there are no Grammar Police.

“The rules of standard English are not legislated by a tribunal of lexicographers but emerge as an implicit consensus within a virtual community of writers, readers, and editors. That consensus can change over the years in a process as unplanned and uncontrollable as the vagaries of fashion.”

(Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style, page 193)

Time Management

Learning how to manage your time is an important skill for your academic as well as your professional life. I will be posting new assignments week by week and I have arbitrarily made most assignments due Tuesday evenings at 11:00. However, I hope that you will space out your own work schedule and submit assignments as soon as you have finished them. I use your work to prepare the next week's lesson, so the sooner I have it the easier it is for me to prepare. I have set aside Wednesday as my own reading day and will always post new assignments right after our Thursday Zoom meetings. Keeping to the weekly schedule will make our lives easier, but if you run into difficulty, it is always better to be late than never. Send me what you can when you can.

In an online course it is important to keep pace with assignments. If you are able to get into the two week cycle of the work, you should have no difficulty with the work load. However, if you are spending more than 6 hours a week, or don’t have enough time to complete tasks, please let me know.

Course Assessment

Your writing projects will accumulate into a portfolio of seven revised compositions. This will represent 70% of your final evaluation.
Weekly reflections on the readings will represent 15% of your final evaluation.
Posting a weekly quote and attending Zoom meetings will be the measure of class participation. This will represent the remaining 15% of your final evaluation.
You may continue to revise, edit, and resubmit a paper as many times as necessary until you are satisfied that it is as good as it can be.
Everyone who does the work will do well. Everyone who also has fun, will do better!

You Are The Author

Our goal is to help you become a better writer. Consider what others and the teacher suggest. However, you are the author and make the final decisions on what you want to say and how you want to say it. Always remember:

It doesn’t matter how well you write if you have nothing to say.

It doesn’t matter how good your ideas are if no one can understand you.