English 111 Ashkenas

Texts: BEDFORD HANDBOOK (6th edition)

THE ESSAY CONNECTION, READINGS FOR WRITERS, 8^th edition, by Lynn Z. Bloom (Houghton Mifflin)

Office telephone: 703-845-6576. (Please don’t leave telephone messages for me if I’m not in the office. Instead, email me at the address below.)

Office e-mail: dashkenas@nvcc.edu

Web page address http://www.nvcc.edu/home/dashkenas

Office hours: TBA.

Course prerequisites:

You must have placed into 111 (WITHOUT LAB) on the Placement Test, or you must have taken and passed the required developmental or ESL preparation courses. You may not take English 111 simultaneously with more advanced English classes (112 or above), with one exception: You may take 111 concurrently with English 135, Applied Grammar.

I’m not responsible for any difficulties you have as a result of being misplaced, just as I’m not responsible for difficulties you encounter because of absence or chronic lateness.

The Writing Assistance Center, Math Lab, and Student Tutorial and Counseling Services offer tutoring and help with individual assignments.

Attendance:

This is a traditional course, not a hybrid course with online requirements. Therefore, please bear in mind that classroom meetings are your main source of information about the required work. No student who only comes to half the classes, as he would do if this were a hybrid course, should expect to pass. See more specific attendance guidelines below.

In any sixteen-week course that meets twice weekly, you shouldn’t miss more than 5 classes a semester. (You shouldn’t miss more than 2 classes in a sixteen-week course that only meets once a week.) In a summer six-week session, every absence counts and can affect your ability to pass the course, so act accordingly. Students with repeated absences, explained or unexplained, may be withdrawn from the course. Even if that doesn’t happen, students who miss classes are more likely to misunderstand directions, deadlines, or other course requirements. That normally lowers their grade or decreases their chance of passing the course. If misunderstandings about the assignments or course requirements are widespread, then I’ll accept responsibility for them and make appropriate adjustments in the requirements. If they aren’t, I won’t. (For this purpose, a “widespread” misunderstanding would be one that confused more than five students who were present when the directions were given.)

Please note: The College asks us to withdraw students who have not attended class, according to our records, in the first three weeks of the semester. The college also encourages us to withdraw students who attend classes initially, but do not continue to meet the attendance requirements posted on the syllabus.

In other words, please attend all classes that you register for. And please don’t just disappear during the course of the semester without letting your teachers know what has happened to you. Never leave your name on the roll of this or any other class you subsequently decide you can’t attend for the whole semester. And don’t expect credit for a course if you don’t attend a majority of the classes.

Course Calendar and Blackboard: The calendar of assignments for this class will be posted soon after the beginning of the semester on Blackboard. I’ll also give you a paper version when you receive this syllabus. Normally I don’t make extensive use of Blackboard during the semester, but there may be special exceptions, which is why it’s important for you to come to class. If there’s anything you need to check or do on Blackboard, it will be announced more than once in class. See SafeAssign, below.

Types of assignments:

Expect both in-class and out-of-class work, and expect some of your grade to be based on in-class writing. Expect at least some of your writing to be based entirely on your experiences and your creative ideas and common sense rather than on research or readings from our reader. When assignments are based on research or reading, expect to be required to give an original interpretation of or fresh insight into this reading, not just repeat in your own words what others say. Expect one longer paper (about 5 typed double-spaced pages or 1200 words minimum) that requires you to form an opinion on a controversial issue from reading several articles on the subject. Expect your thesis in the final paper to be your own original opinion, and expect the paper to require you to comment on and criticize the sources you’ve read, not just repeat what they say in your own words. See the note below on “original writing.”

Original Writing:

Most students have no difficulty distinguishing between their own writing and the writing of others, or distinguishing between their own opinions and the opinions of others. But partly due to advances in information technology, a growing number of students do get confused about these issues. When a student is forced to withdraw from a course because his writing isn’t original enough to satisfy course requirements, that student is understandably unhappy. Students who get lower grades than they were expecting because of these issues are also unhappy. So to keep us all happy, let’s say a few words about these issues in advance.

SafeAssign:

Some of you may know that Blackboard has a plagiarism prevention service known as SafeAssign, essentially an equivalent program to Turn-It-In. com. I’ll be learning to use SafeAssign this semester. Many of your assignments for this class, whether officially labeled as research assignments or not, will be checked against this program to determine whether or not you have problems with paraphrase and/or documentation that might result in unintentional plagiarism. I’ll probably be asking you to submit work through SafeAssign on Blackboard at some point in the semester, though perhaps not immediately. Alternatively, if we don’t do this, I’ll ask you to email me electronic copies of your work so that I may run a SafeAssign check on my own. Therefore, you must be able to submit your work for the course electronically through one of these channels. Please note that this is a course requirement.

SafeAssign is a program designed to help students understand how much effort and thought it takes to write truly original work, as opposed to taking an easier shortcut of simply repeating the words and ideas of others. However, by itself, SafeAssign doesn’t guarantee that a student has written work that has the level of originality I require in this course. Therefore, please pay close attention to the section which follows. It discusses other problems that I may use to identify whether a paper is not sufficiently original for credit and must be redone.

Other Criteria Use to Identify Originality Problems:

Regardless of whether or not I can verify plagiarism, I reserve the right to reject writing because it isn’t original enough to satisfy the learning requirements for this course. The purpose of the course is not just to teach you how to read and write, but how to THINK ABOUT what you read that has been written by others. It’s possible for an essay to show no original thought whatsoever, even if nothing that would technically qualify as plagiarism was involved in the writing of the essay. Essays of this type are as unacceptable as plagiarized essays. Here are some of the hallmarks of this problem:

· The essay contains words the student can’t define and doesn’t use in everyday speech.

· The essay discusses issues, problems, events, or policies the student isn’t familiar with and can’t explain.

· The essay contains words or ideas the student can’t rephrase in simpler language when he’s asked to do so.

· The essay contains abstract ideas or problems that the student can’t illustrate using examples from his own life, the lives of friends, or stories in the news.

· The essay appears to contradict itself, so that the writer seems to hold logically inconsistent views.

· Parts of the essay don’t match the whole—for example, the body of the paper isn’t about what the thesis said it would be about, or the paper draws a different conclusion from the one given in the thesis or implied or discussed in the body of the paper.

· The style of the paper is radically different from the style of writing shown by the student when he writes in class.

· The essay makes use of ideas from outside sources without documenting those sources.

· A writer using outside sources doesn’t carefully distinguish between the ideas that are his own and the ones he has borrowed.

When these issues surface in a student’s work, I don’t always know why. It may happen because the student has copied something from the Internet or even bought a paper online and signed his own name to the paper. Unfortunately, an increasing number of students do this because they think that anything they “found” on the Web belongs to them, the way a quarter you found on the sidewalk belongs to you. Most students know better, but some don’t.

Yet lack of originality can also be a problem for a wide range of other reasons, too. For example, sometimes it happens because a student has asked a friend or family member for “a little help,” and without realizing it, has gotten way too much help—so much help that an objective bystander would say that the paper was co-authored. Since we’re all capable of kidding ourselves about how much help we need, this can happen without a student realizing what he has done.

If I tell you that you have a problem with submitting work that’s not original enough to foster the development of your own independent writing and thinking skills, then I expect you to respond appropriately. The appropriate response is not to argue with me that the problems listed above don’t matter. It’s for the teacher, not the student, to determine whether or not and how much these issues matter.

KEEP ONE HARD COPY OF ALL PAPERS HANDED IN. While I never intentionally lose papers, it sometimes happens by accident. Since I have let you know in advance that I want you to keep a back-up copy, you're expected to do so. If you wish to regard an electronic copy as your back-up, you do so at your own risk. Disks fail. Hard drives fail. Such things are known to happen. ALSO: Please remember that papers submitted electronically or left in my mailbox do NOT receive credit if I don’t get them. Last semester, several 111 students wound up with unexpected Incompletes because they insisted that I “must have” received email attachments I never got. The Administration backs me on this controversy. If I don’t get the work, you don’t get the credit, period.

Any paper handed in becomes the property of the instructor and may be used anonymously in the present or future in a lesson or on the web page as an illustration, unless you write on the paper that you don’t want it used for discussion or reproduced. Common sense dictates that I may spend more time on your paper, though, if you allow me to use it to benefit others.

Late paper policy: Papers are due when I tell you they’re due. However, they may be handed in within one week of the due date without grade penalty. After one week, they lose a letter grade. (For example, a paper that would have received an “A” gets a “B”; a paper that would have received a “B” gets a “C”, etc.) After two weeks, they get a zero (“F”).

Skills a student should have before entering English 111:

This is not a remedial or developmental course. I assume that you have college-level reading comprehension, and that you are fluent enough to write readable English on an impromptu basis in class and unassisted (except by a translation dictionary). I assume that you do not need someone else to correct your English for you at home. (In fact that would be a violation of the principles of academic honesty.) I assume that you have a large working vocabulary in English and that you can command English grammar, syntax, and basic idioms.

Skills developed in English 111: Here we work mainly on "whole essay" issues, such as unity and coherence, clarity, consistency, originality, rationality, and development of concrete detail. Assuming basic competence in use of the language, we learn how to generate more meaningful and original content.

Web Pages & Links: See below. Most of these are not required reading, but any or all of them may prove helpful. If you want these materials and can’t get them for any reason, ask me to print you a copy. After all, this is not a hybrid course, so that’s only fair.

CRITERIA GOVERNING THE ASSIGNMENT OF SPECIFIC LETTER GRADES.

SAMPLE

Rules for paraphrase and critique

Directions for Synthesis/Research Paper on the War on Terror

Sample Narrative Paper on the War on Terror

Sample Comparison/Contrast Paper on the War on Terror

Sample Definition Paper on the War on Terror

Sample Cause/Effect Paper on the War on Terror

Sample Paraphrase/Critique on “Using Our Fear”

Errors in Reasoning as Applied to the War on Terror in 2007

How to Use Movies as Sources in an Argumentative Research Paper

Sample Outline For an Argument on the War In Iraq