ENC 3250 Syllabus
Greetings, and welcome to 3250!
If you haven't already done so, please make a space for yourself to get started in wiki at our class roster page. The space you make there will serve as a space for keeping track, via links and tags, of your writing, wherever it may roam.
Then, please carefully read the following description of policy and procedure, following every link along the way:
To say that one writes "professionally" can mean a lot of things in our present age of information intensification. Traditionally, "professional writing" described a career path, but increasingly, we all must winnow our way through work and life in writing. Some professionals write fully immersed in science and technology (web development, information design, technical writing). Others perform policy and public-interest work, such as researching and writing grants. Writers who report on original or secondary research in specific disciplines and discourse communities must also comply with standards via copy-writing and editing...or hire professional writers who specialize in these areas. Intercultural communication, and the ability to translate specialized terms and concepts into language suitable for a lay audience becomes increasingly important as we become increasingly interconnected, especially in the shared digital medium where writing happens collectively. Sometimes, writing-work takes place in prescribed, formal settings with established protocols and assumptions. Other times, we need to write like a pro "on the go," in ad-hoc project-building environments rife with uncertainty. Each scene and every genre of professional writing either requires or is in the business of establishing place-specific and case-sensitive communications standards, so as to keep the signal-to-noise ratio in balance and ethical inquiry foremost in mind.
ENC 3250 responds to this ubiquity and diversity of professional discourse by first asking you to write right from where you are, already. We will spend the first 3 weeks of the course articulating our own understanding of professional writing, narrating our prior experiences projecting our future plans, and identifying the research issues, questions, and methods appropriate to them by writing together here on our course wiki. This way, we can learn from each other as we select into project teams. Each team will propose a project, plot a timeline of assignments, and fashion deliverables according to the interests and expectations each of you bring to this sustained 15-week exercise in professional writing conducted under the auspices of a university course.
In other words, one group may take scholarly publication as a focus; another group may create documents appropriate to creating and maintaining business operations at an non profit organization. Other foci in professional writing will require different writing itineraries, and, therefore, different assignments. For starters, I'm going to offer a short list of areas--as you begin writing and responding on the wiki, think about what sort of professional writing you'd like to learn more about. We can of course revise or expand these "tracks," but for starters consider these rubrics:
* Health communication and professional writing in medical or other scientific/ethical contexts
* Writing in the public interest, writing for nonprofits
* Digital media, aural and visual communication, information design
* Intercultural professional communication, translation
A list of professional writing tasks and outcomes (assignment templates) grows here, and each each of you will participate in a narrative that informs and educates your 3250 peers about your context for writing, a proposal, and a final project built of professional writing task/outcomes appropriate to your project's purpose. The idea is allow you to customize a professional writing itinerary that will be interesting, instructive, useful, and fun. At the same time, understand that in this course we all must share in and jam to the same bass-line refrain: recursive revision of each other's prose. We will play on this refrain together by means of high-frequency posting and linking on our wiki. Then, once we establish our project itineraries, we'll be able to dial up stylistic and organizational strategies for writing clear, efficient, and highly effective sentences, paragraphs, and documents, at any time. And we'll also learn everything from how to formulate a robust hypothesis to how to handle your research discussion when your outcomes haven't quite panned out as you expected.
Assignments
-each student will make 3 substantial wiki posts per week
-each student will compose a narrative incorporating inquiry, specific examples, definitions, and analysis of a professional writing context
-each group will compose a proposal
-each group will compose a final project (incorporating at least 2 discrete and substantial professional writing tasks)
Bare-minimums
*Acquire and read the books for the course in time for our discussion of them, browse the ProfessionalTools resource list in time to find a use for them.
*For the duration of the course, you will perform at least three significant writing actions per week to this wiki, and link your writing to your "home" page, which you will link to your section's class roster page. This means you will need regular and reliable internet access. Face-to-face section: attend class and contribute to classroom discussions and exercises. Distance ed section: tune in to the wiki, and perform weekly. More than four unexcused absences (f2f) or more than four off weeks (distance) will result in a failing grade.
*Collaborate openly and effectively with your peers towards a FinalProject.
*Complete a proposal and a semester project DueDates in a timely fashion. Late work depreciates one full letter grade per day!
*Open a tab for this wiki in your browser whenever you are online. Check the CourseCalendar, read your peers' wiki posts, and read ShareRiff's mind...in other words, keep "tuning up" regularly and you'll stay in tune with weekly assignment prompts.
Prosody Workshops, Peer-Review, and Response-able Participation
We will dedicate a large portion of each ENC 3250 class meeting to workshopping our writing as it happens. Because our course is premised on the idea that ideas and revisions emerge by means of frequent and dynamic exchanges, students will be expected to visit our recent changes page and revise pages in common, daily. In-class participation will depend on staying in tune with our wiki's activity during the week, by reading and responding to each others' writing. Although daily blogs, responses to peer blogging, and early versions of working drafts need not be “polished,” our early-and-often uploads should address the prompts and issues of the week, as well as address and solicit feedback from your peers. Under no circumstances will I accept a “final” version of a major assignment, proposal, or final project unless I have seen a regular rhetorical process. Students show up to class on the day an important draft is due without having posted draft work by midnight the night class will forfeit all possible participation points for that week.
Attendance, Participation/Assignments, and Grades
Attendance in this course is required. While it is understood that emergencies / University-sanctioned activities may arise which result in your missing one or more classes, frequent absences will negatively affect your final grade. As a rule, one or two absences will have little impact on your final grade, assuming you participate enthusiastically when you are in class and realize you are responsible for all material covered during the missed class(es). In the event that your prepared attendance, or lack thereof, becomes a problem, I will ask you to meet with me to discuss our options. These options may include a failing grade or a lower grade than you might have earned had you attended classes regularly. In short: show up prepared to talk and write about the wiki's recent changes.
Participation--For both sections: timely and thrice weekly wiki posts during the first 10 weeks of the course will account for 100 points, or 33 and 1/3% of your final grade.
Unit assignments and peer-grading will tally another 33 and 1/3%, and final projects will fill out the scale.
This edition of ENC 3250 will rigorously pursue an evaluation process known as peer-grading. Response-able and consistent interaction in wiki will help us create rubrics for each assignment, and each student will do an evaluation of each group assignment. This "swarm" approach will ensure a steady and ample rate of useful and ongoing feedback on our projects. The instructor will in turn grade the rationales detailing and justifying each evaluation, and will also, where necessary and at his discretion, override any "off-the-mark" peer-assigned grades.
Information Management
Please back up everything you write for this course. You should either write your wiki posts in a word processor and save before posting. Or, if you like the feel of writing directly in wiki, cut and paste your work to an open word processing window, saving a back-up version in this way as you proceed. Information technologies carry a trace of instability, so it is always good to have redundancy in your writing process: make copies and put them in different places!
As you will see, classrooms and wikis are both spaces devoted to free inquiry.
This is a rhetorical space, one where composers are response-able to each other: they think and write in response to each other, and not to a preconceived notion of each other. Assume the best in those you study with and be generous with your respect, and you will teach them to respond in kind.
The First Amendment of The United States Constitution
Religious observance absence policy
Students who find a ENC 3250 meeting time in conflict with a major religious observance must provide notice of the date(s) to the instructor, in writing, by the second class meeting.
Disability access policy
In my capacity as instructor in ENC 3250, I will do everything I can to make fully available the educational resources we use and create in section 602 and
section 799. Any student with a disability should be encouraged to meet with the instructor privately during the first week of class to discuss accommodations. Each student must bring a current Memorandum of Accommodations from the Office of Student Disability.
Recent Visitors:
Comments (0)
You don't have permission to comment on this page.