Burlington County College

English 101-317 – Composition 101

Tuesday/Thursday 6:00 – 10:00

Laurel Hall 309/Science Building 115

 

Instructor: William G. Lewis

Office Hours: By Appointment Only

E-mail: wlewis@bcc.edu (This is the best way to get in touch with me)

Phone: (856)630-0993

Website: http://williamglewis.pbworks.com/

 

Course Description:

     This course is designed to help you improve your writing and prepare you for writing at the college level. Knowing how to communicate and write well will be a great asset to you throughout your college years and beyond. Learning to write well will include your ability to think critically, recognize your audience, pre-writing and brainstorming, research, close reading, and the peer review, editing, and revising process.

     The course will emphasize these skills to teach you how to write and the process of writing by exploring other writers’ methods and by reading their texts and by exploring how those texts effectively or ineffectively communicate their arguments. This course will do so using a variety of texts, from essays to short stories to video reviews. By studying and understanding how other texts are crafted, we can better write our own.

 

Course Goals:

By the end of this course you will be able to:

• produce college-level, well thought-out, clear, and effective essays with a clear thesis that is supported throughout the essay,
• navigate and interpret complex ideas through writing,
• navigate texts and identify techniques other writers use,
• analyze a text using effective questioning,
• consider and express the relationship between your ideas and others’ ideas in a productive and respectful manner,
• engage in the revising/editing process of writing with your own and others’ work in an effort to improve it through constructive criticism,
• and research using online and library databases and identify credible sources.
•  

Required Texts:

     The McGraw-Hill Reader, 12th edition, Gilbert H. Muller

     Writing Intensive, 2nd edition, Elaine P. Maimon, Janice H. Peritz, and Kathleen Blake Yancey

 

Attendance:

     You will be expected to attend class regularly and no more than four absences for any reason will be accepted, even under the most extreme of circumstances. If you miss a class, you will essentially lose out on that day’s contribution to your preparation, since it is never really possible to reproduce or recapture the dynamics and flow of information for a missed class meeting (even if you get notes from someone).

 

     For this class, I will be including all recorded absences up to this point. 

 

     If you expect to be absent, please notify me before hand in an e-mail.

 

     If you are absent due to illness or any other unexpected reason, contact me within 24 hours of the class you have missed.

 

     Absences do not exempt you from assignments due that day.

 

     You are also expected to come to class on time, and every three times you are late counts as one absence.

 

     Absences will be excused only for these reasons according to college policy: Students shall not be penalized for missing class, clinical, laboratory, and studio sessions due to: (1) the observance of religious holidays; (2) legal reasons (jury duty; to serve as a subpoenaed witness); (3) required military duty; (4) bereavement: loss of a family member; (5) personal illness/injury of the student; (6) to attend to the medical needs of a family member; and (7) such other reasons as the appropriate Division Dean or Associate Dean may deem appropriate. Students shall not be penalized for attending college-sponsored activities provided that they make accommodations with the instructor prior to the absence(s). Standing alone, absences due to the above reasons do not constitute grounds to lower the grade of a student or otherwise penalize a student.

 

     To excuse an absence, however, I may require that you provide me with some kind of evidence or paperwork appropriate to your reason for absence.

 

     If you are absent from class more than four times (except for excused absences as per the guidelines on page 19 of the 2009-2011 course catalogue), you will receive an F for your grade.

 

Communication:

 

     Phone: If you do call me and reach my voicemail, please be sure to speak clearly and leave your name, course information, and phone number if you wish a return call.

 

     E-Mail:

     If you contact me via e-mail, always include your full name and class section (like this: William Lewis, ENG 101-01) in the subject line. Too often students forget to sign e-mail or have e-mail addresses without obvious identifiers. If you do not include your name and class in the subject line, I will not open the message.

     Students who send me e-mail and do not receive a reply of any kind within 48 hours should assume it was never received. Please re-send any such e-mails. I do not mind receiving redundant messages if you are unsure whether your message was transmitted (though I may only reply to one). If your message doesn’t present itself as urgent, I may reply quickly and briefly and ask to get back to you before long.

     If I send you an e-mail, I will use your BCC e-mail address. If you do not regularly check it, I recommend you have your BCC e-mail forwarded to another e-mail address so you do receive it. I do not accept “I didn’t get that e-mail” or “I don’t use my BCC e-mail” as an excuse.

     I will not answer e-mails with poor grammar or texting speak. I expect your e-mails to use proper grammar. 

  

Grading:

     I am following the grading procedures and rubric from the first syllabus.  Please consult it for information about your grade. 

 

Final Research Document:

     This is the major assignment of this class. All the assignments and readings help to build upon the skills you will need to complete this assignment. It is BCC’s policy that students that do not pass the research paper in Composition 101 will receive a failing grade for the course.

     As such, we will begin the process to write the research paper much earlier than any of the other essays and have several stages to complete it. You will be required to complete several progress checks throughout the writing process.

 

Oral Presentation:

     Not only is written communication important, but so is spoken communication. For your oral presentation you will be expected to present on your final research document. More information will be given on it later in the semester.

 

Expository Writing:

     Throughout the term, you will be expected to complete several essays throughout the semester; most of these will be done outside of class.

 

     All work written and submitted should utilize standard rules of grammar, sentence organization, paragraph organization, and diction.

 

     Essays must be completed in MLA format, typed in 12 pt. Times New Roman font, double-spaced, with one-inch margins, and carefully proofread.Refer to page 331 of the DK Handbook to see a sample essay.

 

     You will receive a handout with the paper assignment at least 2 weeks before it is due for any essay written outside of class.

 

     All essays will be submitted to my e-mail and graded there. Submit essays by the day they are due before class starts.

 

     If you do not adhere to these guidelines, your grade for the assignment will be reduced. If you do not hand in two essays (including the midterm) you will receive an F for your grade.

 

Lateness:

     Late papers will lose a letter grade for each day they are late. If a paper is more than three days late, it is a 0. If you work on an essay in class the day it is due, it is considered late. There are no exceptions to this rule.

 

Academic Dishonesty and Plagiarism:

     Plagiarism and other forms of academic dishonesty are unacceptable in this or any other college course. Plagiarism is the use of another person’s work, either by copying or paraphrasing, and not giving them credit for it. If you plagiarize once in this course you will fail that assignment. If you plagiarize again, you will fail the course.

 

Final Exam:

     For your final exam, you will be given a question to respond to and essays to read that deal with the same topic. In the essay, you are required to blend at least one quotation from one of the essays and cite it properly. More information on the final essay will be given later in the semester.

 

Class Participation:

     Most of this class will involve discussion of the texts we read and how we write. Lack of meaningful participation hurts everyone in the class.  Meaningful participation consists of being prepared, actively engaged in the discussion, organized, and turning off your cell phones. Sharing ideas helps the class, and class participation is expected from you. If lack of participation is class-wide, quizzes and grammar exercises will be assigned instead.

     I will be using a deck of playing cards to choose students at random to answer questions. Each student is assigned a card from the deck and can be chosen at random to answer a question at any time. Responses like “I don’t know” are not acceptable. I invite you to think aloud, muse, guess, and experiment with ideas. Take the opportunity to expand on the ideas of the class.

  

Tutoring Center:

     The Tutoring Center is located on the second floor of the library on Pemberton Campus. There is also a Tutoring Center in TEC 217 in Mt. Laurel. If you are having trouble understanding any of the assignments in class, you can get assistance at the Tutoring Center. There is a link to the Tutoring Center posted on the College website.

     The Tutoring Center is there to help with just about any assignment that you would receive in class. They specialize in helping students one on one and are very flexible in getting the help you need at times convenient for you through the use of both walk-in tutors and appointment tutors. It is highly recommended that you utilize this tool to help revise your essays.

 

Course Outline

Note: The course outline is tentative and subject to change with notification.

     You must have readings done by the date they appear on the outline and the page numbers in The McGraw-Hill Reader are next to the assigned reading. Ex. “The Myth of the Cave” should be read by 4/9.

     If the page numbers have WI in front of them, then the reading is in Writing Intensive.

 

Week 1: 4/7, 4/9

Tuesday: Argumentation

               Jonathan Swift, “A Modest Proposal” (417-423)

 

Thursday:  Integrating Quotes into Your Paper

                  Plato, “The Myth of the Cave” (583-586)

             

Week 2: 4/14, 4/16

Tuesday:  Stephen King, “My Creature from the Black Lagoon” (444-450)

                    Gloria Steinem, “Wonder Woman” (455-462)

                  Deborah Ross, “Escape from Wonderland: Disney and the Female Imagination” (471-482)

 

Thursday: Making Powerful Examples

                  George Packer, “The Broken Contract: Inequality and American Decline” (53-61)

                  Paul Krugman, “The Death of Horatio Alger” (387-390)

 

Week 3: 4/21, 4/23

Tuesday:  Barbara Ehrenreich, “Nickel and Dimed” (395-402)

                  Robert Reich, “Why the Rich are Getting Richer and the Poor, Poorer” (404-415)

 

Thursday:  Research Paper Due

                    No Class

 

Week 4: 4/28, 4/30

Tuesday:  Oral Presentations

 

Thursday: Oral Presentations

 

Final Exam:  5/7, 10:00 am – 12:00 pm