Course Requirements:

Class participation: 15%
Short Paper: 15%
Portfolio: 20 %
Long Paper: 25%
Bimonthly Writings: 25%

Class Participation:
Class participation is not the same thing as just showing up.  The class meetings are important, and what you contribute there will determine the nature and depth of our conversations.  To participate effectively, then, you have to pay attention to what’s going on in between class meetings, which is where most of the work of the course happens. 

 As we agreed, the presentations of Paradise Lost will be informal, and will be included in your grade as part of your class participation. As we also agreed, optional participation in a peer response pair or team will also factor into that grade.  I will also add activities throughout the semester (like the paired essay readings and talks on Things Fall Apart) that will count as participation in class. 

 Here again, let me stress that just doing the activities will count as minimal effort—quality is what we’re looking for. Depth, substance, good questions, thinking beyond the obvious, looking up words you don’t know, working on your reading and your writing: these are the qualities that will earn you a good grade in class participation.

Short Paper:
For this assignment, you are to compose a piece of writing in any genre (traditional essay, experimental nonfiction, poem, letter, short story, picture book, etc.). As you compose your piece, you are to keep a journal or log of your process, starting with the minute you read this assignment. Write about what you felt when confronted with the project, what you did, how you thought about what you were going to do. As you progress, then, keep notes about how that process works for you--what prewriting exercises did you do? where were you and what were you doing when your idea hit you? did you change your mind several times, or stick with your original idea? did you write down any ideas or notes? in what form? when and where did you get stuck? what did you do about it? where were you and what were you doing when you got unstuck? what was more important for you as you developed your ideas--reading other people's work? talking it out with friends? driving? working out? spending time alone? playing video games? socializing and doing things that are unrelated to the project--(only include what's relevant here--perhaps you were in the middle of a party and an idea suddenly struck you, or you used going out as a break from working on this assignment)? how did you draft the project? what did you do with your draft after it was finished? major revisions? minor edits? abandon and start all over? Date your entries. Don't fudge.

You have learned what are currently considered best practices in facilitating the process of writing. What we want to get at here is what your own process entails. 

You will turn in both your finished project, and the log of your process. The process log may be typed or handwritten. Due October 2.

Portfolios:

1)      Collect samples of your best work from each of your English classes, and any other papers that you have written that you feel demonstrate your abilities as a writer. Ideally, you will have at least 13-15 entries, with 9-10 being a minimum.

2)      Compose a 2-3 page introduction that reflects on your growth as a writer. You should address your relative gains in such things as conception and depth of understanding, organization and strategy, and style, referring to individual papers as examples, quoting yourself as needed to illustrate your points. You may want to discuss substantive threads that run through your topic choices, and document the growth of your thinking as you pursued several papers on similar topics. Read your own work as if it were a text to be analyzed, even if doing so makes you cringe.

3)      Provide a table of contents.  

Note: For purposes of state review, we will also be including your bimonthly work for this class in the portfolios, but it will be evaluated separately. However, you should include your bimonthlies in your table of contents, and if you desire, talk about them in your introduction.

Long Paper:
We will construct this assignment together within the next several weeks.

Bimonthly Writings:
Every two weeks, you will write an out of class essay/poem/story/prose narrative/photo montage/webpage/zine/really-anything-that-employs-a-distinctly-recognizable-sign-system to convey an idea in response to a prompt. The purpose of these adventures is primarily to meet the course goal of reflecting on your achievements as an English major, and secondarily to work on the goal that several of you cited as important to you--to improve your writing, and/or to branch out into other kinds of writing. Hence what I expect from you is a well-wrought piece.  At the same time, I want you to view these exercises as essays in the literal sense of that word, which means "to try."  In these writings (or whatever they turn out to be), I will be looking for you to try out ideas and/or styles, to have some smart fun with your head. (That means if you find these assignments tedious or boring, it's your fault.) Don't make it too easy on yourself; remember, schemata have to be broken down for true learning to take place. Note that this does not preclude more traditional approaches to these prompts.