College Reading and Composition I
Students gain proficiency in reading and writing through application of the principles of rhetoric and the techniques of critical thinking. Prerequisite is an understanding of the elements of grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure. Formal research paper required. Required for English majors.
By the end of the term, students will be able to do the following:
Analyze rhetorical and thematic elements of college-level fiction and non-fiction by composing critical analyses, including a research paper, with clear thesis statements and specific, relevant support.
Compose unified, coherent essays, including a research paper, with minimal errors in Standard English grammar, mechanics, and MLA format.
This course uses open educational resources (OER) materials; no textbook purchase is required. Electronic copies of assigned readings will be posted in each of the respective assignments. The primary course text can found by following the link below:
The work for this course is mainly divided into two categories: participation/homework and essays/papers. The breakdown of your final course grade will be as follows:
40%—Participation/Homework
60%—Essays/Papers
Generally speaking, each assignment in the journal, participation, and homework category will earn full credit if it adheres to assignment instructions, is fully completed, and is submitted on time. Work that is incomplete or does not follow assignment instructions may earn partial credit.
Essays/papers are graded according to a rubric covering several criteria: Unity/Content, Coherence/Structure, Support/Development, Sentence Skills, and MLA formatting.
<70% = not passing (revise/resubmit)
70-79% = C
80-89% = B
90-100% = A
Please be aware that it is highly uncommon to receive a "perfect" score on an essay/paper submission in my class; this is not due to work being unsatisfactory, but rather because I believe there is always room for some improvement to any serious piece of writing. If you have earned a score of 90% or higher, that constitutes an A. In my class, if you have earned an A, you are doing exactly what you are supposed to be doing. Let go of any notion of "perfect" and try to embrace the idea of "better than before."
For most of the work submitted, I will provide written comments in the gradebook comment area for each particular assignment. (Some homework/participation grades may be submitted without comment if the score is fairly self-explanatory.) I strongly urge you to adjust your notification settings in Canvas to receive a notification when I add a comment to your submissions. This way, you should see my feedback in a timely manner. Any work that earns less than 90% may be revised based on my feedback and resubmitted for a new score. Please be sure to read my comments and/or consult the rubric score for an understanding of how each grade was calculated. If you would like to ask questions or discuss my feedback, I encourage you to schedule a meeting with me.
The purpose of the narrative essay is to convey a life lesson that you have learned from your own direct personal experience. The lesson should be one that other people can relate to or benefit from, such as, "The process of training to run a marathon taught me that people can accomplish great things if they seek out reliable help." The experience you choose to write about should convey a life lesson that you have learned connected to your topic category—something about yourself, about people, or about the world. Your life lesson might even be as specific as something you learned about your family, your friends, or about the city or neighborhood you live in. Whatever the lesson, the important element is that you are writing about a lesson you learned based on life experience—and one that other people can benefit from.
The thesis statement for your narrative essay will be connected to your life lesson. The support (body paragraphs) can be made up of life experiences—both summary and detailed—as well as information from outside sources related to the topic you've chosen. As an example, an essay on the topic of technology might focus specifically on how reliant people are on cell phones. Using personal examples of losing my cell phone in various ways, I might organize my essay around the following thesis: "Each time I have lost my cell phone, I have experienced firsthand the level of technology dependence people in modern society have developed in recent decades."
Ultimately, a narrative essay should do two main things: 1. Involve storytelling; 2. Express or convey some viewpoint (a lesson or message) about the topic category you have chosen.
Your narrative essay should be a minimum of 3 pages in length (750 words) and include a Works Cited page with 2 reliable sources. The entire document should be properly formatted in MLA style. You should be sure to include well-formed introduction and conclusion paragraphs, and your body paragraphs should be well-organized with clear topic sentences at the beginning of each paragraph.
For this essay, you will explore the deeper meaning behind a short story. What does the short story tell us about the world, about life, about people, about society--or about anything else? In short, what does the story mean? For example, someone might make the following claim: "The short story 'A&P,' by John Updike, illustrates the foolishness of making a life-changing decision based on a momentary feeling."
As an alternative, you may choose to focus on one specific aspect of a story, such as character or setting, and explain its meaning. For example: "The character Arnold Friend from Joyce Carol Oates' story 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been,' represents the type of evil that tends to arise as a result of vanity."
Once you have formulated some theory about the meaning of the story (or some part within the story), construct your essay using specific language from the story as evidence to support your view. As always, include an introduction and a conclusion, along with a well-developed body that adequately supports your viewpoint. The viewpoint or claim you are making about the short story will be your thesis statement.
For your essay, you may choose to write about one of the short stories posted in Canvas. You may not select a short story of your own to analyze.
Your literary analysis essay should be a minimum of 3 pages in length (750 words). A Works Cited page is only required if you cite sources other than the short story your essay analyzes. The entire document should be properly formatted in MLA style. You should be sure to include well-formed introduction and conclusion paragraphs, and your body paragraphs should be well-organized with clear topic sentences at the beginning of each paragraph.
NOTE: This is a LINKED assignment, connected to your argument essay and research paper. Your expository essay will serve as the first portion of your research paper. Be sure to choose a topic you would like to stick with for the remainder of the term. Expository essay + argument essay = research paper draft.
To get started on an expository essay, consider a problem or issue of concern related to your chosen topic category (food, education, technology, or race/class/identity) that you would like to "expose" to an audience. The readings we have covered previously in this class addressed issues or concerns within the context of these topic categories. I would encourage you to raise a different issue, perhaps one connected in some way to what you wrote about in your narrative essay. Please keep in mind that this is not a narrative essay, and so you will not be focusing on your own personal connection to the issue in the essay. Instead, you should discuss the topic in terms of its larger social significance. Additionally, you should not write a basic informative essay about a well-known or well-understood topic. Your essay should strive to offer some new or unique perspective or insight on the topic at hand.
Some questions you should consider addressing in the essay:
What is the problem or issue?
Why is it a problem/issue?
Who is affected by it?
How are people affected?
When did it become an issue?
Where does the issue exist?
Once you have identified a thesis--your main claim on the issue, think about what types of support will help your readers to better understand the viewpoint you are expressing. Will you need to describe a cause/effect relationship between things? Will you need to compare/contrast? Is there anything that must be defined for an average audience? Use these and other questions to consider how best you to explain your viewpoint to your readers. Organize your ideas in a logical manner to formulate the body paragraphs (support) in your essay.
Finally, use your conclusion to readdress your thesis in light of the supporting ideas you have provided in the body of the essay. The conclusion can also offer implications (other related matters to think about or seek more information on) or applications (possible actions that can be taken on the issue).
This expository essay should describes a problem or issue, NOT the solution. While your conclusion paragraph might give a brief glimpse at some possible solutions, the goal of this essay is simply to expose the issue. Your next essay--the argument essay--will be used to discuss a solution to the problem or issue you describe in the expository essay.
Your expository essay should be a minimum of 1000 words in length, or roughly 4 pages, and include a Works Cited page with at least 3 reliable sources. The entire document should be properly formatted in MLA style. You should be sure to include well-formed introduction and conclusion paragraphs, and your body paragraphs should be well-organized with clear topic sentences at the beginning of each paragraph.
NOTE: This is a LINKED assignment, connected to your argument essay and research paper. Your argument essay will serve as the second portion of your research paper. Be sure to continue forward with the topic you chose for your expository essay as you work on this argument essay. Expository essay + argument essay = research paper draft.
This essay will focus on convincing your readers that specific action should be taken regarding the problem or issue discussed in your expository essay. Consider what you wrote about in your expository essay as a problem to be addressed, and then use this argument essay as a way to spell out how you think that problem should be solved. To write an effective argument essay, you should formulate a thesis that addresses the question of WHAT needs to happen and WHO is in a position to do something about it. For example, "There should be greater awareness of the issues of food accessibility" would be a vague thesis statement, as the statement does not clearly identify who should do something and what they should do. A better statement would be, "Community organizations in major cities should create public awareness campaigns to draw attention to issues of food accessibility." Note how this statement aims to achieve a similar goal as the first statement, but it clearly identifies WHO will take the action and WHAT the action will be.
Other considerations that your essay should address include the following:
What is at stake, or why does the topic matter?
Who is affected by the issue, and how are they affected?
Why is the solution you identified in your thesis the ideal way to address the matter?
Why is the group or individual you identified in your thesis the right group/individual to solve the problem?
What are some relevant counterarguments--who might disagree with you, and why are you right?
Acknowledge points of agreement you may share with those who have different views. (For example, no matter how a person feels about gun control, they are likely to view school shootings as a bad thing.)
Your argument essay should be a minimum of 1500 words in length (roughly 6 pages) and include a Works Cited page with 3 reliable sources. The entire document should be properly formatted in MLA style. You should be sure to include well-formed introduction and conclusion paragraphs, and your body paragraphs should be well-organized with clear topic sentences at the beginning of each paragraph.
Your research paper draft should consist of two parts: part 1--the expository essay, and part 2--the argument essay. (Students who chose not to write about the same issue on both essays will need to do a little catching up to fill in the missing half of the research paper draft.) Since you have completed and submitted the draft and revised versions of both of those essays, the final step is to work on combining the two into a single, unified paper. For the purpose of this class/assignment only, you may reuse the material from your previous essays word-for-word, copy-and-paste style, to create your research paper draft. I have purposely designed the assignments in this manner, so please be aware that this type of reuse is not likely to be acceptable for other classes or other assignments. There is no need to cite or quote yourself; the previous essays were simply building blocks for this larger research project.
The research process you embarked on in the crafting of your expository and argument essays led you on a journey of discovery. Combining and unifying those two essays is part of a process meant to help you identify and answer additional questions that arose regarding your topic. Having read through a variety of academic sources that discuss various aspects of your topic, your knowledge and understanding of the topic should have grown and changed, and your final research paper should reflect that learning.
There will be no draft submission or peer review process for the research paper beyond the work already done with the draft/final versions of the expository and argument essays. Please be mindful that your work on the research paper should not end with copying-and-pasting your final/revised expository and argument essays; you should spend some time unifying those essays by adding necessary transitions, including additional supporting material uncovered through your research process, and cutting out repetitive or redundant material resulting from merging the two essays.
To combine your expository and argument essays together, the structure or outline of your paper might look something like this:
Introduction to broader topic (intro of expository essay; 1 paragraph)
Discussion of problem/issue (body of expository essay; 3-5 paragraphs)
Transition from problem to solution (merging of expository conclusion and argument introduction paragraphs; 1-2 paragraphs)
Discussion of solution (body of argument essay; 3-5 paragraphs)
Conclusion that ties it all together (conclusion from argument essay; 1 paragraph)
Following an outline like the one discussed above would easily yield anywhere between 9 and 14 paragraphs.
Your research paper should be a minimum length of 2000 words (roughly 6 to 8 pages in proper MLA format) and include a Works Cited page with at least 5 scholarly sources. The entire document should be properly formatted in MLA style. You should be sure to include well-formed introduction and conclusion paragraphs, and your body paragraphs should be well-organized with clear topic sentences at the beginning of each paragraph.