Engl 101 writing

ASSIGNMENTS

Please follow the Syllabus listed in Course Information on when to complete each assignment of the course.

When submitting assignments, please follow these instructions:

Document Structure: Assignments should be submitted in Microsoft Word or RTF format. They should be professional looking and include a first page containing:
 
• Your Name
• Your StudentID 
• Course Number
• Course Name
• Title of the Assignment

All documents should have page numbers.

Transmission: Please email all assignment submissions for this course to with course ID, assignment number, and your last name in the subject line (e.g., ENGL101 Project 1 LASTNAME). Please do not send assignments to any other address.

Project Instructions

All writing projects must use the following settings:

· Entire document should be double spaced (Do not add extra space between paragraphs.)

· Indentation = 1 tab indentation to start each paragraph

· Margins = 1-inch top, bottom, left, and right

· Font = Times New Roman or Arial

· Font size = 12 pt.

· Length: 3-5 Pages (Pages beyond 5 will not be read.)

Failure to abide by any of these instructions will result in an automatic deduction of 5 points.

Project 1

Your first essay in this course will be a personal narrative–a story from your past (either distant past or more recent history)–that has been influential on you in some significant ways. Carefully reflect back on a time in your life and bring that series of events to life for your reader. It is essential for you to carefully describe the scene of the narrative, give dialogue and action of the characters involved, and show how those people and their interactions with you affected you significantly. An essential rule will be: show, don’t tell. In other words, it is a much better idea to let the narrative demonstrate the significance of the story rather than for to you to write, “This event was important to me because….” Typically, this narrative will be a first-person story that reflects on something important about you.

Project 2
The second writing project asks you to look critically at a contemporary social or cultural issue. You will analyze the situation surrounding a political issue, confront some community problem, discuss a phenomenon within popular culture, or respond to some situation that is pertinent and important within today’s context. You are to think and write critically about that situation. It is likely that you will find yourself staking a claim or taking a stance relating to the issue you write about. It is possible, in fact, that you could find yourself constructing and supporting an argument. If so, don’t worry-it is perfectly natural to stake a claim and back it up when critically analyzing significant public issues. Though you won’t be writing a strict “cause and effect paper” or a paper that only engages in comparing and contrasting issues, your paper will be more powerful if individual paragraphs in your analytical essay will address the causes and effects of your topic or compare and contrast issues within your topic.

Project 3
The key difference between argument and persuasion is that persuasion necessitates your selection of a specific audience to which the writing is addressed. While the analytical essay allows you to defend a stance (making an argument), the persuasive piece asks you to select a problem you hope to resolve and choose a specific person or group of people who can do something to bring resolution to the problem. You will be attempting to persuade that audience to take a specified action that will remedy the problem as you present it. It is essential for you to name the exact audience whom you will write to; leaving the audience vague (“I’m writing to just anybody”) is not an option: If you don’t write to somebody, then nobody will be convinced to do anything. You also will need to decide on a genre of writing that will be the best way to reach your selected audience. If you are writing to an individual, then you might choose to write a persuasive letter; if you write to a social group, then you might write a letter or speech to be presented at that organization’s meeting; if you are writing to the citizens of your town or city, then you might choose to write an article in the local newspaper; if you are writing to college-aged men, then you might choose to write a feature article for a young men’s magazine. Just as finding a problem to address will help you select your audience, pinning down your audience will help you decide on an appropriate genre for reaching that audience. Importantly, you will be presenting your audience with a problem, proposing an action they could take to help resolve that problem, and persuading them to take that action.

Midterm Exam

The mid-term exam consists of ten short-answer questions, which draw from the course textbook readings, the class modules, and your understanding of the principles of writing discussed through the first three writing projects. The midterm asks you to recall definitions of material from the text and to apply it to your writing situations. Answer each of the following questions with a 3?5 sentence response. Each question is worth 10 points, totaling 100 points for the midterm.

1. Briefly describe the key differences between personal reflection and personal description.

2. Name two types of prewriting strategies, and describe how they can be used in writing or how you have used them in your writing.

3. Describe the difference between freewriting and focused freewriting.

4. What is the difference between a comparison and contrast paragraph and a cause-and-effect paragraph? How do those kinds of analyses differ in the way they approach a subject?

5. Defining and classifying seem like very similar activities. How do those kinds of analysis differ, and how are they similar?

6. It has been said that the difference between an analytical argument and persuasion is the selection of a specific audience. Why is choosing an audience so important for persuasion?

7. Imagine you were asked to persuade a potential student to attend your college next year. Name three genres of communication you could use to deliver your persuasive argument, and explain why you might choose each genre.

8. Describe the individual pieces of a business letter.

9. What is a refutation, and why is it important in persuasion?

10. What is a call to action, where does it come within a piece of persuasion, and what is its function?

Project 4
Up to this point, the writing projects in this course have asked you to draw from your mind to create the information of the essays. In the fourth project, you will investigate and inquire into the world outside of your mind to derive the information that will build your essay. In this project, you will investigate one of the disciplines within which you are currently studying, and compose a report about the main concerns students in those fields have: What sort of preparation does a major in that field need to enter into it? What kinds of courses do majors in that discipline take? What kinds of jobs do graduates in that field go into? If you have a field that you have either declared as a major or are considering joining, it might be a good idea to select that discipline to investigate.

To gather information on your chosen field, you must include at least five sources of data:

· One must be your own personal observation of students, teachers, or activities related to the field.

· One must be an interview with someone within that field (a teacher or a student in that discipline, perhaps).

· One must be from a government publication about careers, such the Occupational Outlook Handbook.

· Two must be printed resources such as textbook, a professional association’s web site specific to the discipline, or some other piece of literature about the discipline.

From these sources, you will gather information about the discipline that you will use to compose a report about what is needed to join the field, what the experiences are like within it, and what professionals in the discipline do. Be careful to accurately and completely cite all sources.

Final Exam

Question 1

As you composed your essays this term, how did the concept of audience affect your writing? You had to think about audience within your persuasive text. You probably thought about the audience of your discipline report and research essay. It is possible that you did not think so much about audience during your personal narrative, or alternatively, you might have considered yourself to be your audience for that personal writing. Choose two of the essays you composed during this class and discuss how you dealt with the issue of audience as you wrote the essays. How did selecting (or not selecting) an audience change your writing process and the essays themselves? (3 to 5 pages; 50 pts)

Question 2

The word epistemology refers to studying the source of knowledge. Episteme means knowledge or understanding, and -ology refers to the study of something. Think about the epistemology of the essays in our course. When you wrote your papers, what was the source of that information or understanding? Choose two of the essays from the class and discuss their epistemology. Write about what you had to do to develop the knowledge and understanding that you demonstrated in the essays. That is, discuss the resources (both your research as well as your own thoughts and experiences) that you used as you wrote and revised the essays. (3 to 5 pages; 50 pts)