ENGL 1301 Introduction

Overview of Day 1 Introduction of Instructor, Roll, Short Writing Exercise Textbooks Course Overview/Expectations Assignments /Grading Raider Writer /E-Handbook Site BA 1

Introduction of Instructor, Roll, Writing Exercise When I call your name, please correct me on any mispronunciation, preferred names, major/intended major, year, and favorite song, artist, or genre of music. For the first few weeks of class, please write your name on a piece of paper (large enough for me to see) and display it on your desk. This way I hope to learn all of your names quickly! While I am calling roll, please write a short response to these questions: What role do you anticipate writing to take in your major? What types of writing will you have to do?

Textbooks First-Year Writing: Writing in the Disciplines. 9th Custom Ed Texas Tech University. Boston: Pearson Learning Solutions, 2015.  *Must be 2015-2016 edition! The St. Martin’s Handbook (TTU E-Custom Edition). The first textbook must be bought at a Tech-affiliated bookstore (B&N at the Sub, Varsity, Red and Black, etc.). Amazon and other online booksellers will not have this textbook and if you are able to buy one via Amazon, it will most likely be an older text. These texts are required and we will be using them throughout the semester. If I think that you are not reading the assigned chapters out of the texts I will enact surprise quizzes and book checks. So bring the hardcopy Writing textbook to class every week.

Course Overview/Expectations ENGL 1301 is your introduction to the major writing challenges at Texas Tech. It is designed to start the process of making you critical readers, thinkers, and writers and to think about the implications of communicating in a global landscape. First Year Composition at Texas Tech is scaffolded, meaning that all of the assignments will work towards the end goal of making you competent writers and comfortable with the writing challenges in your respective major. In 1301, the major paper is the rhetorical analysis and all of the Brief Assignments (BAs), will work towards this analytical paper as the final product.

Course Overview/Expectations Con’t. My expectations of you: to be conscientious of yourself and others, be attentive towards the work of the class and time management, and be open to new ways of writing and examining texts. This course is designed to challenge you, both as a writer and critical thinker. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that this is an English class and will not help you in your major because it will challenge you to start developing your own voice and style, think about your audience, and the appropriate rhetorical choices you need to make in order to reach and convince your audience.

Assignments As mentioned previously, all of the assignments are scaffolded towards the end goal of the rhetorical analysis. BA 1 (due at the end of this week) asks you to start thinking about audience, purpose, and rhetorical choices. The following BAs start to develop your tool kit of summary, paraphrase, identifying rhetorical choices, crafting working thesis statements, and utilizing quotes. Ideally, by the time the first draft of the rhetorical analysis is due, you have completed about 2/3 of components needed for this draft. In 1301, you will also be working on peer critiques and revision, allowing you to gain experience at working through composition problems and the ways to help others with specific constructive feedback. Most assignments will have a word count, you have to make the minimum word count otherwise you will be docked points. Try to get the assignment as close to the maximum word count as you can if you go over. I will address the word count for future assignments later on in the semester.

Grading Grading in First Year Composition is conducted through Raider Writer. You will submit your assignments online and then an anonymous grading group will go in and grade your assignments (your submissions are anonymous to this group). The grading group is normalized, i.e. I tell the graders what we have covered and the areas that they need to focus on when grading your assignments. There are four of us and all of us are experienced instructors and graders, so don’t think that I have pulled in random people to grade your work. If you have questions about grades or comments, feel free to contact me via email to look the assignment over. I do not guarantee that I will change any grades unless there is a major problem and you have an equal chance of the grade being lowered if I am seeing that the grader missed problematic areas.

Raider Writer/E-Handbook Will be demonstrated in live view for a hands-on approach. The E-Handbook is required, you can buy it at any of the campus bookstores and they will give you the online log-in certificate.

BA 1 For this first assignment, you will be examining two different areas of composition. Part 1: your personal writing experiences and history. I am not going to go point by point, but answer the questions and be specific! Be specific about the types of writing you have already done and at what level. What are your strengths in terms of writing a paper – research, pre-writing, detail-oriented work, global view of the issue at hand? What are your weaknesses? Do you have problems pinning down a topic, getting off track in your writing, coming up with a thesis statement (is it too broad or too narrow), finding sources, summary/paraphrase/quotations, are you not sure of your voice and strength as a writer in terms of clarity, etc.

BA 1 Con’t. Part 2: Analyzing the letter. Make sure to look at the one that corresponds to the beginning letter of your last name! Read the letter at least twice. Identify the audience and purpose. Be specific! For some, the audience may be easy to identify, but on others you may need to think about what type of relationship is there between the writer and the recipient. Think about the purpose and critically think about what the writer is doing in the letter. Is it just reporting information? Does the writer have ulterior motives, i.e. does the writer discuss some events first before other more serious problems? If so, make sure that you incorporate that into your discussion of purpose. Keep in mind that the purpose may be multi-faceted or pointing the audience away from certain results.

BA 1 Con’t. Finally, in the Part 2 paragraph, discuss critical choices that the author makes. This is your introduction to what you need to look at during the semester. The author constructs the letter in a certain way in order to advance their purpose and try to sway their audience to support this purpose. For example, what type of diction would you use if you were talking to your friends? What type of diction would you use when addressing the President of Texas Tech, queen of England, etc.? I’m sure that you will choose different registers, i.e. types of language use and words for these different audiences. This is one type of critical choice that a writer has to make in order to write to a specific audience. Think about the structure of the letter, tone, use of evidence and types of evidence, etc. Basically, the critical choices are limitless in terms of what the author does in order to advance their purpose. NOTE: There is a different between appeals and choices. For this assignment, you want to look for choices, not appeals. ETHOS, PATHOS, and LOGOS ARE APPEALS NOT CHOICES. WORD COUNT: 400-600 WORDS.

Homework for Next Tuesday Read Robert MacNeil, “Do You Speak American?” (306), John Simon, “Why Good English is Good for You,” (332), and Douglas McGray “Lost in America” (351) on top of the other readings for Week 2. Please write a ½ page response on each of the above essays. Discuss: the strengths and weaknesses of these essays, what you thought of the author’s overall argument, what did you agree with, what did you disagree with, did you learn anything that you weren’t already aware of, what is the intended audience of each essay, what are some of the arguments against the author’s main points? You don’t have to answer each question point by point, but make sure to touch on all of these issues in your response. You will turn in the responses in class on Tuesday.