<English 435 Assignments>
schedule | syllabus | blog | assignments | researching
Blogs
For this class, you will keep a blog. You are expected to post your thoughts twice a week on the course readings, course discussions, your own writing, related topics, and/or your classmates' thoughts. (Think a longish paragraph or two per post.) Posts should be completed Monday and Wednesday before the start of class. The blog format will allow you to get some thoughts down on this various topics, which will help you learn the materials more fully and will help you prepare for the other papers and projects in this course. You will also select some of your blog posts to include in your portfolio. All of your classmates' blogs are linked to my class blog here.
Paper One: Professor Interview (printable version)
One thing we've been discussing is that what good writing is depends on who you ask. For your first paper, you will interview one faculty member here at Ball State about his or her thoughts on writing. You should interview a professor who assigns writing frequently; for variety, try to pick someone outside of the English department. This interview will give you perspective into one professor's ideas about writing. As a class, we'll see if we can see any patterns emerge from all of the interviews. Overall, I’d like you to be able to speak to what the professor values about writing; what is “good writing” for this person? Ask any questions that will get you able to pinpoint this and will give you evidence to back up your claims about this, such as examples, stories, and so forth.
Some things you’ll want to find out:
o The professor’s writing style & process
o Personal writing history—successes & failures
o Best writing mentor & why
o Favorite writers or books & why
o Types of writing projects he/she assigns to students (ask for copies of a couple assignments)
o Grading criteria used to assess student writing
o Beliefs about student writing ability at Ball State
o Thoughts on importance of writing in his/her discipline/field/for majors in area
o Memorable student writing
You should conduct this interview in person. Be courteous and do not bombard someone during office hours. Ask beforehand for a good time to meet. Explain the assignment to see if the professor is able to give you the time. Prepare lots of questions before you arrive. When you go to interview him or her, take exceedingly good notes (which you’ll hand in with your draft). Thank the instructor for his/her time when you leave. Ask for clarifications via email.
You can write this interview up in any style that you think would be appropriate to give a vivid, telling, and accurate portrayal of your interviewee's thoughts about writing. (I'm not opposed to audio or video essays--see me if you are interested in doing so.) You should not just give Q and A's. There should be an attempt on your end to interpret, place, and respond to what you've learned from doing your interview. Your audience will be members of this class (current and future tutors), so what you decide to use from your interview into the essay should be relevant to that group.
Your paper will be evaluated on content, appropriateness for audience, fluency, and creativity. Aim for 4-6 pages for this one. Drafts due for peer review on 1/30. Revised draft due to me on 2/6. Hand in questions and interview notes with your draft. You will receive feedback on your paper and will be able to revise your paper again for your final portfolio.
435 Paper Two: A Student Composing (printable version)
For your second paper for this class, you will follow a student writing a text (broadly conceived) for personal or school purposes. Doing so, you will get insight into how someone else takes on a composing task. It's important, I think, to understand that all writers take on tasks in different ways, to understand that there are many routes from point A to point Z. This requires a type of primary research since you will collect your own data for analysis.
To do this, you will need to select a student who has a writing task at hand. The writer must be working on this task during the next few weeks. (In a perfect world, the task would be due before spring break, so you can write about the completion of the project.) The student must agree to give you the following:
an interview
a copy of the assignment sheet/task
drafts from each composing session (you'll want at least 3 drafts)
a follow-up interview
You can keep your student writer's identity confidential by assigning him or her a pseudonym.
Your job is to report on the student's process (in general and during this specific project) and interpret what you discover for fellow/future writing tutors. You are welcome, though not required, to compare the student's process to your own. You should aim to discover:
how the student conceived of the writing task (what does he/she think the task requires?)
how the student prepared for the task before beginning to draft
when the student began to draft and how
what changes the student made from draft to draft
what resources did the student use (books, research, people, teachers, tutors, Google, etc.) to complete the project?
what the student thinks is successful and not in the final (latest) version
Learning this, you can then reflect upon it. What did the student see as important about the task? How do you know? Did you think the same things were important? What surprised you as you saw the changes from draft to draft? Do you think what you see in this one student speaks to a larger issue about student writing? If so, what? These are the types of questions you should ask yourself as you move from collecting and reporting data to interpreting it. This is how you develop a thesis or central argument by thinking through what the data says or how it can be read.
Though when you do primary research like this you must collect the data first, it doesn't mean that you have to report all of your data and then interpret it in your paper. In fact, in most cases it would seem to be most appropriate to offer (an) interpretation(s) first and then support them with your collected data.
The paper will be evaluated on content, fluency, creativity, and appropriateness for audience. It can take any form that you believe to be appropriate for the topic, argument, and audience. (Multimodal, video, or audio essays are options.) Again, think about 4-6 pages for this paper.
3/17: Peer Review
3/19: Paper Two Due (include interview questions and notes, collected data, drafts, and peer feedback)
English 435 Discussion Leaders
Each of you will take a turn as a discussion leader this semester. Your job will be to read the reading very closely to understand it well. Then you will formulate a series of questions on the readings that your classmates will respond to in whole group discussion. The questions should not only be on comprehension (like: What’s the opposite of lower-order concerns?). Instead, most of your questions should be thought-provoking—most likely, they will be questions that have no one right answer (like: In “Revisiting the Writing Center,” North says the Writing Center should only work with English majors. What do you think about that?). See the difference? Your goal is to get the class excited to discuss the readings.
You will be evaluated on your questions and your ability to ignite, direct, lead, and carry the discussion that follows. The discussion should last for at least 15-20 (but no more than 30) minutes per essay. You might decide to assign an activity to inspire discussion. This is fine as long as there is still time devoted to discussion of the readings also. You should hand in your questions to me at the end of class.
English 435 Paper Three: The Tutoring Life
For your last major paper, you will observe a tutor. You may pick anyone who tutors (on campus at the Writing Center, at the Writing Desk, at the Learning Center, at Tech Time, at the Journalism Writing Center; or off campus at MOM or elsewhere). You will need permission of the tutor and the director. (You have my permission to observe in the Writing Center, but you should get verbal consent from students being tutored, too.) If you work at the Writing Center, it might be most interesting to you to observe a different place.
Your goal is to show us a representation of tutoring. We’ve read (and will read more) about what a certain kind of tutoring is like (Writing Center tutoring). How does the tutoring you observe compare? What’s similar and what’s different? What did you learn from watching tutoring that you didn’t learn from reading about tutoring?
Since you’ll be observing a real-life tutor, you’ll want to give specific, physical, concrete details. Where does the person work? What does it look like? How often? How many people work there? What are all the things that happen in that space? What’s the usual tutoring protocol? What crazy things happen? What’s the tone of the employees? What do they wear? What do they say? What do they not say? How much do they get paid? What’s the turn over? To paint a complete picture, you’ll need to know these sorts of specifics. Be careful not to lapse into generalities that make assumptions about your readers (see below). Don’t say, for example, “Jim looks like every other undergraduate at Ball State.” Or, “The room is just a normal room with tables and chairs.”
[Things to observe for: use of space, rituals, beliefs, language use, artifacts, attire, attitude, patterns, and rules.]
Your audience for this piece would be the general public who doesn’t know a lot about tutoring in general or tutoring writing specifically. Or, you can decide to narrow in on a smaller audience, say, those who thinking about a job as a tutor, those who are looking for a tutor, or professors/teachers/administrators who may not understand what happens in a tutorial session.
You will need to observe one tutor for at least 3 sessions/hours. You will probably find it easier to write the paper if you observe more than that. You may complement your observation with interviews, photographs or video (get permission!), site mapping, and/or artifacts. You should use outside research in this paper to situate the claims you are making about tutoring: aim for 5-7 sources (some may come from material we’ve read in class if they are appropriate for your argument and audience). We will talk about research more in the coming weeks. See Researching in Composition Guide.
This project may be done collaboratively (up to 3 students). Each student still should observe for 3 sessions/hours.
The paper can take a form you feel is appropriate for your argument and audience (a newspaper article? A website? A profile piece for a magazine? A letter?). You’ll probably find this paper will be longer than your others because you’ll include a lot of details and outside research. I think it would take at least 2000 words (about 8 pages). Like your other papers, you will be graded on fluency, content, creativity, and appropriateness for your audience.
Peer Review: 4/7, Due Date: 4/9
