English 191 Fall 2009 sections 85 Monday nights (B51room317)and and 21 Tuesday in B51 lab 221 – from 5:00-8:20 PM

Where to reach the instructor: Lawrence Hall 116, office hours MTWF 10-11 and by appointment 308-4978. email: roland@stcloudstate.edu (please use a subject line beginning with "EN191f09#21" or "EN191f09#85". If you don’t use that beginning for your subject line, your email may be filtered out as junk mail. I receive 150-180 emails every day. I depend on your cooperation. Thanks!

Global Cultures & Communications

Welcome to your English Composition class! We will be meeting in the English Building B51 and enjoy access to the world-wide web during class time in Room 221 (not in 317). When using internet resources, please remain critical about what you find. We will conduct the class with a handbook that you need to get as soon as possible: The Bedford Handbook, 7th edition, Bedford/St. Martin's, Boston and New York, 2006-2009. You can buy the softcover 0-312-59504-2 version or the hard cover 0-312-59505-0. You will have to invest in paper for printing, and other resources you may need, including a dedicated USB Cardchip for your work. You are expected to maintain all files for this course on your home computer or husky space and also on that USBflash drive.

The course objectives

Reading, writing, and critical reasoning based on different text types and situations related to Global Cultures & Communications. We will explore the creative as well as analytical side of writing, discourse, and structure together. You will write short and longer papers and learn to edit your writing, improve your arguments, and become more effective communicators. All the while you will learn about other countries and cultures and explore the otherness of non-US speech, text, discourse and argument.

The semester will be structured as follows:

Part I: 8/23+24; 8/31+9/1; 9/8 (section 85 has no class on 9/7 but section 21 will meet on Tuesday); 9/14+15; 9/21+22will be used to work through parts of LEO and The Hyper Center of the U of Ottawa

Part II: Group projects working with international students. September 28+29 October 5+6; October 12+13October 19+20. Present results and group papers on October 26+27. Group projects consist of interviews with international students that you will transcribe and evaluate. Each group may find its own international interviewees, but all should come from the same region or country within that group. That way any group will focus onone region or country only. Each student is expected to conduct and tape at least two interviews, and transcribe the better interview as their contribution to the group. Your interviews and interview reports will reflect on the following necessary information:

Inquiring from the international interviewee:

You chose St. Cloud in Minnesota as your international study site. What are the reasons?
How is SCSU different from universities in your country?
Do male and female students have the same rights and responsibilities in a university in your country?
What are major differences in comparing your life here and at home?
Who in your family earns an income and who determines what happens in a family?
Are there single parent families in your country, and how do single parents raise their children and work for their household income?
What is the image of the USA in your country?
What are your hopes and wishes for the future?
Is it important to separate state functions and religious functions, or what are your thoughts on church and State?
Open question group members.

Part III: Individual final project. On November 2+3, you will determine your own final project and explain it to the class. The final paper will be 1200-2000 words long. It needs to feature library book resources, and paper articles, not found on the internet. The works cited and works consulted pages (MLA style expected) at the end of the paper cannot evidence more than 50% internet resources. The other half needs to be library resources and primary materials not from the world wide web. The topic needs to be discussed with the instructor, and mutually agreed upon. You will work on your final project and attend class discussions and reviews in B51 room 221/section 21 or room 317/section 85 on November 9+10 and 16+17. on November 23+24 and November 30+ December 1, we will review from the Bedford Handbook while you continue work on your final paper project. Final projects are due for presentation in class on December 7+8, and in written form on December 14+15 at the final. Section 21 meets Monday, Dec. 15 at 5PM in B51 room 221, while section 85 meets on the 14th in B51 room 317. Attach your final paper to an email, and send it to Roland@stcloudstate.edu. Be sure to write into the subject line EN191f09-section and our name+ title of the final paper.

At the end of this class, I hope you will adopt these practices:

-- Several drafts are needed until a paper or presentation reads well

-- Writing and researching improves as you allow others to critique your work, and make suggestions for your benefit.

-- If in doubt about a sentence, paragraph, or page of your text and its role for the entire paper, just cut it out.

-- “Less” is usually “more”, if “less” was edited and revised intelligently.

-- Any text element in your paper that is not your own writing and expression, needs to be referenced as the work or idea of others.

-- Use of technology cannot make up for lack of reflection and poor writing design.

-- You can only write about what you know; resist writing about things you do not understand.

Journal or Blog

You are expected to keep a paper journal or blog. Whenever you “freewrite”, “list”, “research”, or keep records of books and urls used, use your journal. The journal is supposed to show evidence of how you went about tasks, which books and homepages you used, etc. Every time you search for a topic (e.g. www.google.com) I require you to record the urls used and the date you visited that page. Use a word-processing program or an editor simultaneously with the browser to keep records. Print the pages after you saved it to your personal disk, USB storage card, or Husky account and paste it into your journal. If you forget or loose your journal you cannot work effectively in class that day. Immediately buy a new journal and reconstruct what was lost in the first one. A person without a correctly kept journal cannot achieve better than a B – even if everything else is A+.

Grading

	Participation, Quizzes, Presentations	25
	Papers, Tests, Editing	25
	Interviews, Journal, Recordings	25
	Final paper	25
bonus points
excellent papers, always present	5
Providing useful contributions in class	5
Supporting peers	5	+10 max
malus points
-didn’t do homework completely	-1to -3
-missed meeting w/out PRIOR notification
1st mtg missed	-5
2nd mtg missed	-10	-15max
3rd mtg missed (Dept. policy[1])	F-grade	failed
-late arrival, early departure without permission
First/last 15 minutes	-2
First/last hour	-3
50% of class time	-5
4 fatal errors: if you confuse any of the following words in any of your papers, a malus of 2% will apply each time you misuse them.	effect – affect it’s – its there – their to – too We will focus on these four this semester; however, there are many others: review http://www.serendipity.li/errors.html	-10max

Attendance

I require you to attend each meeting for the full duration and to arrive on time. The above bonus/malus points reflect your attendance and commitment. A doctor’s statement is needed in case you should fall ill. A police report is needed to explain emergencies. If I find out that you lied to or misled me about attendance issues, you fail the class.

Printing

You will have to print pages each time we congregate in R218. Bring a debit Husky card for that purpose. Expect to pay no less than $10 this semester for pages printed.

[1] Handbook for Teaching Assistants, English 191: Introduction to rhetorical and analytical writing, English Department, St. Cloud State University, 2006-2008, by Donna Gorrell, revised by Raymond Philippot.

p. 118.

English Department Objectives

Students will improve rhetorical sophistication by learning to make choices as writers and by developing their abilities

* to discern different situations, aims, and purposes in writing

* to use different modes of inquiry, development, and presentation in writing

· to modulate their written voices, diction, and style according to different

· rhetorical situations

* to edit their own writing for grammatical correctness and appropriate usage

· to develop in writing points, judgments, and critical perspectives coherently with

· appropriate support and evidence

* to respond to, evaluate, and revise their own and others' writing.

Students will develop their abilities to engage critically with various kinds of discourse, texts, and information, learning

* to describe, summarize, and analyze discourse, texts, and information accurately

· to develop critical strategies for researching, evaluating, interpreting, and documenting various

· discourse, texts, and information

· to use researched material for support and evidence in analytical and rhetorical writing

ibid. p. 9

Ibid From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ibid (Latin, short for "ibidem", "the same place") is the term used to provide an endnote or footnote citation or reference for a source that was cited in the last endnote or footnote. It is similar in meaning to idem, abbreviated "Id.," which is commonly used in legal citation.

To find the Ibid source, one has to look at the reference right before it, and so 'Ibid' serves a similar purpose to 'ditto marks' ( " ).

Also means: This word/phrase/concept also defined in this document.

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Example

· 4. R. Millan, "Latin for dummies" (Academic, New York, 1997), p. 23.

· 5. Ibid., p. 100.

The reference in no. 5 is the same as in 4 (R. Millan, "Latin for dummies"). Note that the page number is different.

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