ENG 105 English Composition I, Fall 2013 Prof. Roxane Pickens Email rpickens@miami.edu Phone 305-284-4673 Office Hours Thursdays, 930a.-1130a., and by appointment Office 110 Pentland House Introduction to Writing and Critical Inquiry Description This course introduces college-level thinking, researching, writing, and revising, and it seeks to familiarize you to the life of the mind through your own efforts at questioning the world around you. Specifically, our work will center on the ideas and practices of critical thinking and writing about yourselves, our closer communities, and our larger societies, for the express purpose of aiding your intellectual development at university and beyond. Your work will involve readingdeeply, broadly, thoughtfully, inquisitivelyfrom a variety of materials, and you will be asked to synthesize these analyses in various written forms, including in-class responses, out-of-class writings, and traditional essays. The goal here is two-fold to help you develop processes and skills necessary for effective communication, and to orient you to some of the intellectual methods youll encounter within the scholarly community. While this will be done largely with an eye toward the written word, you will engage in significant discussions and conversationsboth formally and informally in and outside of classas a way to stretch your thinking and increase your ability as a writer. In this class, you should strive toward writing that is interesting, nuanced, and complex. As such, we will work together on the following course aims Engage in critical questioning Use texts as invitations for engaged thinking writing Deploy more sophisticated rhetorical strategies in writing Consider writing in a more self-reflective manner Cite sources informally How we manage these practical and analytical skills will be through regular reading, discussion, and writing about the various ways that we apprehend, question, and ultimately appreciate the world in which we live. Course Texts Required Readings posted on Blackboard The Intelligent Eye Learning to Think by Looking at Art (Perkins) How to Not Write Bad The Most Common Writing Problems and the Best Ways to Avoid Them (Yagoda) Computer access with standard word processing program and Internet access Recommended Writing Matters (Howard) or The Everyday Writer (Lunsford) a good college dictionary thesaurus Course Requirements The primary tasks for this course include written essays, a course portfolio project, and a presentation, with active class participation and group work accounting for your day-to-day efforts. Here are the main writing assignments included in this course Essay 1 (observation and analysis) Essay 2 (self/communal ideas analysis) Essay 3 (language/ideas survey/analysis) Portfolio Presentation Full Portfolio w/Essay Revisions 75 of final grade (comprised of the above) Class Participation 25 of final grade. The above in detail you will earn only two grades for this courseone for the semesters worth of writing, composed in a portfolio and visually presented in a Pecha-Kucha format (more details on this to come but see HYPERLINK http//www.pechakucha.org/ http//www.pechakucha.org/ for initial details) and one for your class participation. Together, these scores will make up your final grade. Each essay assignment will include pre-writing and multiple drafts, for which you will receive comments and suggestions from your peers and from your instructor. You will be required to workshop your writing in small groups, and you will have brief individual sessions with me to get direct feedback on your work. In addition, because the writing you do for this course is based on selections from our course texts, you can expect homework and presentation assignments that show your comprehension of and engagement with those materials. The semesters writings will culminate in a cumulative portfolio. Portfolios are an
