EXPO E-15, Section 8 (24078) FUNDAMENTALS OF ACADEMIC WRITING Harvard Extension School Spring 2014

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1 EXPO E-15, Section 8 (24078) FUNDAMENTALS OF ACADEMIC WRITING Harvard Extension School Spring 2014 Instructor: Classroom & time: Dr. Elisabeth Sharp McKetta mcketta.harvard@gmail.com Online classroom Th 7:40-9:40 EST Overview: Reading: Grading: Writing: This course is designed for students seeking preparation for EXPO E-25, Introduction to Academic Writing and Critical Reading, and for students who wish to review such basics of academic argument as thesis, evidence, and structure. You ll do short writing assignments that will help you develop the skills essential for producing persuasive academic essays. You ll also learn strategies for reading and analyzing complex texts. In this course, you ll learn how to develop your ideas and how to persuade readers that your ideas matter, and you ll learn how to do this using clear, lively, and graceful prose. Required: Course Packet online on class website Required: Barnet, Bellanca, Stubbs, A Short Guide to College Writing (5 th ed.) Recommended: Hacker and Sommers, The Bedford Handbook (8 th ed.) 25% Assignments (each counts 5%, the lowest one drops) 30% Essay 1 40% Essay 2 5% Participation You ll write two 4-5 page double-spaced essays. The first essay will ask you to take a stand on an educational issue; the second will be a close reading of a short story. We ll break down each essay into steps; to prepare a draft, you ll complete and hand in brief weekly pre-draft assignments that ask you to brainstorm ideas and build the scaffolding for the major parts of your essay. You ll submit one draft and one revision for each essay assignment. To get the most out of the course, you need to make each draft a complete, fulllength essay (that is, a piece of writing with a beginning, a middle, and an end) with a controlling idea, organization, and supporting evidence. You ll receive feedback on your draft from your peers and me, and, after substantial re-working of that draft, you ll submit a revision. Seminar Format: This is a seminar class in which everyone s active participation is not only encouraged, but expected. I hope that even if you are generally reserved, you will make an effort to participate in discussions and our website blogs. Sharing ideas especially those you may feel tentative about is a mark of intellectual generosity. Registered students should come to the first class familiar with our online classroom; you should also have a microphone so that you can participate in class discussions. 1

2 Online Courses: Harvard Extension School s website Division of Continuing Educations offers an overview of online courses which you may access here: Because this class is taught in a participatory seminar format, there will be no lecture videos, rather recordings of each class will be available to registered students. Students will benefit from the classes conducted in Blackboard Collaborate as well as from the resources on our course website. Before registering and attending our first class, students are expected to be familiar with Harvard Extension School s distance education policies, which you may access here: If you have questions about the technical aspects of the course, need help with downloading the appropriate software or accessing our classroom website link, please go to this website: For answers to Harvard Extension School s FAQs, please go here: Peer Review: Each essay is preceded by one peer review. You will have a peer review group of 3-4 students throughout the semester, and before each essay you are responsible for closely reading all of the essays in your group and giving each other written notes and comments for improvement. The point of peer reviews is to work together to locate what these papers are working to say and then give informed, respectful suggestions to help the writer say it more clearly. Indeed, responding to your peers work will help you become a sharper critic of your own writing; the more you give, the more you get. Schedule: Writing courses at Harvard are rigorous and move along at a quick and steady pace. This means that we must make the most of the time we have together each week. You are expected to be logged on and to be fully prepared to participate when class begins that is, to have done all the required reading and writing assigned for that class. Please come to class on time. Be sure your technology is in good working order, that you keep your work backed up and have extra hard copies, and that you know where you can turn for help if your technology fails. No late assignments are accepted. Late essays go down a letter grade for each day late. All assignments and essays must be ed by MIDNIGHT (12am EST) on Tuesday night to mcketta.harvard@gmail.com. Participation: Even in an online course, student attendance and participation is required and essential. If you are absent from class without valid excuse more than twice, you risk being excluded from and failing the course. Any student who is more than 15 minutes late in joining class will be counted as absent. If you must miss a class, please notify me by in advance, and consult our class website for recorded classes and any missed materials. 2

3 Conferences: Before each essay is due, you are responsible for scheduling a conference with me during mutually convenient times. These conferences will be devoted (1) to discussing how to revise your essay to make it express more effectively what you want the essay to say and (2) to setting goals for the assignments to come. Please prepare for these conferences by rereading your draft and making some notes for yourself regarding the possible ways you might go about revising. A missed conference counts as an absence. Writing Center: Take advantage of the resources available to you through the Extension School s Writing Center in Grossman Library. Students enrolled in online courses may schedule appointments up to one week in advance, but are limited to two tutorials per week totaling no more than 7 tutorials per semester. To request a tutorial, send an detailing the course you are enrolled in, an explanation of the assignment and due date to writing_center@dc .harvard.edu. Attach your assignment in Word (.doc or.docx) or Google Docs. As always when seeking feedback, ask specific questions and explain your concerns about your writing. You should receive a response within 72 hours. If you are a local student, the Writing Center asks that you come for an in-person tutorial. Their website is: center. Submitting Work: All exercises, drafts, and final versions of essays must be titled, wordprocessed (ideally in Microsoft Word), double-spaced, paginated, and with one-inch margins left, right, top, and bottom. Your last name and a page number must appear in the top right corner of every page. Every essay submission (drafts and final versions) must be accompanied by a short letter to your readers explaining the idea of the essay, its clear thesis argument, the challenges in its composition, and its strengths and weaknesses as you see them. Please proofread your work before you submit it. Error-ridden essays whether the errors are due to mechanical or formatting errors will be marked down. For this course, please use the MLA in-text citation style. (Although we ll discuss academic citations in this course, I d like you to learn how to use this citation style on your own time. Refer to the Harvard Guide to Using Sources: When submitting final drafts of Essays 1 and 2, you are expected to have read and learned from all comments on earlier assignments, and to submit copies of your peer review group s comments on the draft. You also must also must keep copies of all drafts commented upon and/or graded by me, peer reviewers as well as any Writing Center tutor feedback as well as reader letters given to you by peers, Writing Center tutors and me. This means you are responsible for keeping a portfolio of your work from the entire semester, which will track your growth as a writer. You ll also want to be able to consult this material when you write cover letters for your drafts and revisions, and you ll want to acknowledge accurately the advice you ve received when you prepare your final revisions. 3

4 Grading: Plagiarism: I will grade only the final version of each essay, but I will comment on each first draft. Unlike your essays, your writing exercises will be evaluated only with a check plus ( +), check ( ), or check minus ( -). In grading your revised essays, I will check to see that you ve addressed comments that your peers and I have made. I adhere to the following criteria: A means exceptional, B means good, C means adequate, D means deficient, and E means unacceptable. You must complete all written assignments to pass the course. Please be advised that final grades are indeed final. Plagiarism is the theft of someone else s ideas and work. It is the incorporation of facts, ideas, or specific language that are not common knowledge, are taken from another source, and are not properly cited. Whether a student copies verbatim or simply rephrases the ideas of another without properly acknowledging the source, the theft is the same. A computer program written as part of the student s academic work is, like a paper, expected to be the student s original work and subject to the same standards of representation. In the preparation of work submitted to meet course, program, or school requirements, whether a draft or a final version of a paper, project, take-home exam, computer program, placement exam, application essay, oral presentation, or other work, students must take great care to distinguish their own ideas and language from information derived from sources. Sources include published and unpublished primary and secondary materials, the Internet, and information and opinions of other people. Extension School students are responsible for following the standards of proper citation to avoid plagiarism. Please consult the Harvard Guide to Using Sources, prepared by the Harvard College Writing Program, for a helpful introduction to all matters related to source use: identifying and evaluating secondary sources, incorporating them into your work, documenting them correctly, and avoiding plagiarism. We also recommend that you complete our short (15-minute each) online tutorials Using Sources, Five Scenarios and Using Sources, Five Examples ( before you submit any written work. These tutorials will help you learn what you don t know about using sources responsibly. Academic Integrity: Harvard Extension School expects students to understand and maintain high standards of academic integrity. Although we will go over what constitutes plagiarism and steps to avoid dishonest use of sources, students are expected to be fully familiar with the school s Student Responsibilities and Academic Integrity policy posted at: Students suspected of academic dishonesty are subject to review and disciplinary action by the Administrative Board for University Extension. Essay Sequence: The full assignments for Essays 1 and 2 begin on p.5 of this syllabus. 4

5 Class/Work Schedule Class Overview Read for next class Write (due Tues 12am) Th 1/30 week 1 Intro, rhetoric, annotation, Ed. Essay1: Disadvantages Ed. Essay2: Live + Learn Ex.1.1 annotating + summarizing (due 2/4) in-class diagnostic essay Ed. Essay3: Loss Creature Th 2/6 week 2 Rhetorical analysis, reading Harvard Guide to Using Sources College Writing chp Ex.1.2 responding + questioning (due 2/11) Th 2/13 week 3 Using sources, plagiarism CW chp 1-2 Ex.1.3 developing a working thesis (due 2/18) Th 2/20 week 4 Sample Student Ed Essay -- Writing a thesis + conclusion CW chp Th 2/27 week 5 Structure, PR workshop plan All essays in your PR group Essay letter (due 3/4); PR comments due by class. Th 3/6 week Peer Review (Conferences) Th 3/13 week 7 Revision vs. editing Th 3/20 week 8 SPRING BREAK! No class. Th 3/27 week 9 Finding themes in literature Th 4/3 week 10 Close-reading a text Th 4/10 week 11 Analysis, extrapolating Th 4/17 week 12 Style, persuasion Th 4/24 week 13 Peer Review (Conferences) Th 5/1 week 14 Putting it all together Harvard Writing Companion Student Literary Essay #1 Optional: A Little Cloud Essay letter (due FRI 3/14) Story1: Refresh, Refresh CW chp 8 Ex.2.1 finding/annotating passages (due 4/1) Story2: St. Lucy s Home Ex.2.2 close reading Story3: What You Learn passages (due 4/8) CW chp Ex.2.3 developing a thesis question (due 4/15) All essays in your PR group Essay letter (due 4/22); PR comments due by class Essay letter (due FRI 5/2) 5

6 Essay 1 The Persuasive Essay: Taking a Stand on an Educational Issue Academic writers in the social sciences and the humanities make a living in great part from staking out a position on various issues. Entering into debates that mark their fields and public discourse, they clarify, refute, complicate, or elaborate on arguments that other writers have made; often they advance ideas that spawn new debates. This work also offers the personal satisfaction that comes from voicing ideas so rigorously and thoughtfully that their colleagues and the educated public take those ideas seriously. To convince their audience that their position on an issue is valid, writers take pains to define the reason for discussing an issue (motive), to express a compelling not obvious, not frivolous idea succinctly and precisely (thesis), and to develop that idea with analytical claims, evidence, and attention to objections that an opponent might make to their idea (counterargument). To become familiar with such tools and experiences of academic writing, in your first essay you will take a stand on an educational issue. After reading the three essays, you ll choose one text and focus on a significant aspect of its argument about education that you find problematic. This is perhaps the most difficult challenge of the assignment, yet the ability to shape a compelling question from your reading a question that can drive an argumentative essay is absolutely central to effective academic writing. Writing Exercises will help you toward that goal. To craft an effective essay, then, you ll need to define the problem that you see in your selected essay s argument, thus showing your readers your motive for writing your essay, for staking out your position. You ll need to express your essay s arguable assertion your stand, or idea, or thesis on that problem and to persuade your readers that your stand is valid by using evidence from your text (and possibly from other assigned readings) and from your experience. To strengthen your argument, you ll also need to anticipate any objections that your readers might raise to your idea. EXERCISE 1.1 Read the assigned essays. Then select one essay that you would like to think about further. You ll want to choose a text whose ideas challenge the beliefs you hold so that you can generate a provocative idea for your essay. This text will be the central source for your essay. Whenever you read a text, your first job, always, is to determinate accurately what it has to say. So the first exercise of this sequence asks you to write a pure summary of the essay you ve chosen. (1 page, double-spaced) Some Advice: 1. Read the source essay you ve chosen again and annotate the text. By annotate, I mean mark up your text, underlining or circling or highlighting key passages, words, and phrases, and noting in the margins what the author s thesis (main idea) and supporting claims are. The aim of this reading is to determine accurately the author s main idea, that is, the argument he or she is making. 6

7 2. Then locate important supporting points. Zero in on the key points; forget (for the moment) the rest. 3. Begin your summary by identifying the author and the source. State the main idea. Then present his or her key supporting points. 4. Don t evaluate; merely report, using your own words and an occasional quoted, cited phrase. Your aim in this summary is to provide a concise, accurate version of the original. 5. Use MLA manuscript formatting and citation style. EXERCISE 1.2 By now you ve selected a text, and by summarizing the author s main idea and key supporting points, you ve accurately determined what the text says. Exercise 1.2 asks you to investigate the text by asking what truth the author has to offer you. Consider the world from the author s point of view. How does the evidence of your personal experience, your observations, or your knowledge tend to affirm or disaffirm the author s ideas? Explain to the author in a letter of about two pages, using your own everyday voice. Feel free to invent other education-related questions that help you pry beneath the surface of the text or that allow you to make imaginative connections to evidence from your personal experience, your observations, or your knowledge. Please cite the title and author of any sources other assigned essays or any other outside texts you ve read that you might refer to. As you write this assignment, consider that there are three basic ways to respond to an opinion (or an author s essay): I agree ; I disagree ; or I agree and The third ( I agree and ) gives the most structure for building upon and entering an already ongoing conversation. (1.5p) EXERCISE 1.3 In Exercise 1.2 you considered what truth the author of the text has to offer you. Now it s time to fine-tune your opinions about the text and the educational issues it brings up. Based on your findings in Exercise 1.1 and 1.2, what do you feel most strongly about in terms of this conversation about education? In other words, what point do YOU have to make that is most worth making, and that you feel most qualified to make? Grounding your opinion in the voices of one (or more, if you wish) of the education essay authors, write a single paragraph that includes the following 3 parts: what your opinion is; why or in what context it matters; and who should care most about it. For this paragraph, start with the conversational style of Exercise 1.2, but practice dressing up with any academic styles or conventions that you found appealing in the education essays. Again, cite the author and title of any outside sources that you may refer to. (.5p-1p) 7

8 ESSAY 1: Taking a Stance on an Educational Issue Exercises have helped you define a position on your selected assigned essay. In Exercise 1.1 you have summarized the article and in Exercise 1.2 you affirmed and challenged the author s stance based on your own experiences. In Exercise 1.3 you developed what will be the seed material of your thesis for Essay 1. Now, you will write an academic essay analyzing the educational issue. You should focus on some problematical aspect of the source, a gap or inconsistency, and explicate the problem. You should push beyond or against the author s (or authors ) ideas to offer an idea of your own. (4-5pp) Some advice: 1. Focus. What question or problem provides the focus of the essay? Be sure to introduce this problem in the introduction of your essay and orient your reader in terms of who, what, when, and where. 2. Evidence. The middle of your essay, the main body, has to accomplish three tasks in terms of specific evidence: a. Provide necessary background information b. Elaborate the problem as you see it c. Develop the problem Giving evidence for your claims is one way of persuading your readers that you ve thought carefully about the point you re making. Evidence for a claim may be as simple as a direct quotation or a paraphrase from the text; but quotations generally do not speak for themselves you must explain how they illuminate the point you re making in order to let your reader follow your logic. That is, to reach your audience you need to demonstrate how and why your evidence really does support your point. 3. Idea. What is your idea; that is, what conclusion (interpretation) do you come to? Does your idea account for the evidence, and is the evidence sufficient to the idea? 4. So what. Finally, do you do more than merely demonstrate a problem? Are you offering a new perspective or a new solution to the issue at hand? Be sure you don t leave your reader asking So What? once they ve finished reading your essay. 5. Conclusion. A conclusion should be a zinger: the souvenir for the reader to take home and keep thinking about. A conclusion can allude to a further question, the so-what factor, or to a slightly different restatement of what has been argued. 6. Write a cover letter to me about your essay. I will expect such a letter for every essay you turn in, draft and final essay. Tell me the subject of your essay (state your main thesis) and tell me what you think its strengths and weaknesses are. Your letter need not be exhaustive, but it should be specific. Half a page sounds right as long as it takes for you to identify the essay s strengths and weaknesses. In articulating for yourself what you ve written about, where it works and where it doesn t, you will become an attentive critic of your own writing and ideas. 8

9 Essay 2 The Short Story: Analyzing a Text A common type of academic argument is the interpretation of what a text might mean. Scholars call this kind of interpretive operation a close reading of the text, or a textual analysis. Instructors expect students to perform this kind of analytical operation with proficiency, for the mastery of interpretative skills gives students the powerful tools they need for thinking and writing in and outside their fields. Since the skill of textual analysis is so important, our second essay assignment of the semester will introduce you to the demands of interpreting a single text in this case a short story. The essay will offer your interpretation of what the story is most essentially about. How can you explain and describe the essence of the story? In a conventional summary, you would mostly be giving the straightforward details of the story: the who, what, when, where, how in these assignments those details will emerge but they will unfold as part of your explanation of the story. Unlike a straightforward summary, which usually would not provoke much response, your interpretive summary should be arguable it should invite analysis. To help you with this operation, you will first work your way through three predraft exercises that reflect the different strategies that scholars use when they interpret a text; then you will write a draft. EXERCISE 2.1 Read Benjamin Percy s Refresh, Refresh. First, read the story all the way through so that you have a sense of it as a whole. Then re-read the story and annotate the text; that is, mark passages that perplex and interest you, circle words or phrases that seem to make a pattern in the text or that strike you as intriguing; jot down in the text s margins any questions or ideas you have about what this story might mean. Choose three passages that you think are significant. A passage may be a few lines or a short paragraph. By significant, I mean important, curious, or problematical in terms of the whole story. Don t shy away from passages you don t understand or that don t seem to fit in. Often, it is exactly such a passage that will turn out to be the key to your view of the text. Quote each passage and note the page number in parentheses. Then, after each quoted passage, briefly explain why you chose it. (1.5-2pp) EXERCISE 2.2 In Exercise 2.1, you investigated a text by close reading, annotating, and selecting key passages. This assignment asks you to investigate an additional story using a different approach, and still starting with close reading. Read Karen Russell s St. Lucy s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. Reread and annotate it. Choose two scenes that you would point to as evidence for your claim, and one scene that poses a challenge to your claim you will use these to write an interpretive summary of the story. Briefly describe each and how it works (or does not work) to support your interpretation. What do you make of the writer s choices in these scenes why choose to let the story unfold in this particular way? Why choose to have 9

10 the character make a specific comment, or take an action in a certain way, at a certain moment? Be sure to pay close attention to the language of the scenes. Which words are especially noteworthy which are most evocative, suggestive, persuasive, strident, surprising? Which words puzzle you? (1.5pp) EXERCISE 2.3 Select one of the assigned short stories for Essay 2. Reread the story you ve chosen to write about, taking notes, underlining key words and phrases, marking the passages that seem important or different or strange. Summarize the story in a sentence or two and then say what issue or issues it engages. Then pose two questions about the issue or issues two questions about (in other words) what the story means. Each question should: 1. be a real question, a question to which there is no single, easy answer 2. refer to the particular passage or passages in the story that made you ask the question articulate what you find genuinely puzzling or mysterious about the story (1p) ESSAY 2: Analyzing a Text This essay should explore one of the questions you developed in Exercise 2.3 and should provide a tentative answer to it. If you are still having difficulty focusing your essay, use the approaches from Exercises 2.1 and 2.2 with the story you have selected to provoke more analysis. Your question will become more focused and probably more complicated as you reread and think: your initial sense of what happens in the story may change as a result of your work; a new issue may have emerged; your understanding of what s most important about the text may become more complex; an alternate way of interpreting the story may become more compelling. At this point in the process, you ll likely want to consider some new passages and reconsider some old ones. Think of your task here as explaining to your readers what the text you ve chosen to write about means. Your readers in this case are your classmates and me. Assume we ve read the story you re writing about, but that we don t know it as well as you do. Take us through the story as if you were a tour-guide in a city: show us your interpretation of what the story is essentially about, offering and analyzing particular passages from the text. Be sure to give your essay an interesting title. Your draft should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. It should be vividly written in clear, economical prose, and, like all good essays, it should attempt to open your readers eyes to some new way of seeing things. (4-5pp) Essay #2 Checklist: answer these questions in writing before turning in your draft. 1 What is my CLAIM? In other words, what am I guiding my reader to see in this story? Make sure it is arguable (as in, somebody could argue against it.) 10

11 2 How does each supporting paragraph make a logical block toward supporting your claim? State what each of your paragraphs does. Aim for 4 paragraphs: 3 that show a logical progression, and then a 4th that shows the consequence. 3 Within each paragraph, is there enough evidence to uphold my topic sentence or supporting claim? Aim for 3 pieces of textual evidence introduced, quoted, and interpreted within each paragraph in other words, 3 quote sandwiches (should be about 10 sentences per paragraph: 1 topic sentence + 3 quote sandwiches). 4 Does my conclusion have an a-ha! or light-bulb moment that echoes the thesis and truly surprises the reader? 11