Welcome to 1102!

Hello class,

Introduction

I hope all of you have had a fun filled summer and are ready to get back to work. This blog is where I will post some of my own thoughts about our readings, topics, lectures, your comments/papers, etc. You will also be creating your own blog which I will check and comment on. Here's how you do it:

1.) go to blogger.com

2.) Create a google account (or use one you already have)

3.) create your blog.

We will go over how to do this in more detail in class. However, if you can, I suggest creating it soon.

Class Goals

The goal of this course is not only to help you become better writers, but better readers. I believe that reading and writing are two sides of the same coin. In order to be a good writer, you have to be a good (and honest) reader of your own work so as to revise with a purpose (we will talk more about this). Furthermore, I believe that reading and comprehending good writing will help you become better writers.

The focus of this course is academic writing. Academic writing, as you no doubt already know, is not about "expressing" oneself or feelings. Instead, it is useful to think of academic writing as a written conversation. Rather than thinking about research as merely about gathering facts, you should try and think of research as familiarizing yourself with a topic that no doubt someone else has already explored in another way.

The key to academic writing is to avoid getting bogged down in other's opinions and thoughts, while still taking them into account. This is a difficult task that I am still grappling with as a graduate student. Our reader, Bartholomae and Petrosky's Ways of Reading assumes that undergraduate students are ready to grapple with difficult, complex, and unusual texts. Reading the introduction to this book (one of your first tasks) will help you understand their own thoughts on how to use the book. We will try and follow their guidance.

I have my own thoughts about this (I will go over this more in class) but essentially, I admit that these texts are hard. It takes me, a very experienced reader, a pretty long time to get through one of the essays. I recommend that you read these essays TWICE (as does the editors of the reader). First, read quickly and focus on content--if you do not understand something immediately, just keep moving and try and understand a part of it. Then, read the text again, trying to figure out those moments that were confusing to you. Also, attempt to pay attention to how the writer makes the argument rather than just the argument itself. This is not easy, and I will be guiding you through it as we move through the course.

Course Structure


I have no problem with giving lectures and probably will try to do so as an overview of our other required text. However, the MAJORITY of the first half of the course will be spent reading and writing about the texts in Bartholomae and Petrosky.

The second part of the course will shift toward focusing on your own research projects and writing. I hope that the skills we learn from reading Bartholomae and Petrosky will carry over to your final writing project.

We will deal with the second part of the course later. As far as the first part of the course goes, I expect that you come into class having read the text AT LEAST TWICE. I expect that you not only have read the text but have "taken notes" either in the margins, underlining, or on a separate piece of paper. We will spent lots of time reading pieces of the text, discussing the text's structure, and discussing how we could use this text for our own arguments. This means that I expect you to bring your books to class EVERY DAY.

All of these expectations will be repeated when we are in class, but I am using the blog so that you can have access to these expectations at any point and time.