NOTE: In addition to the reader for this course; some readings are on-line. They are listed on the syllabus or sent out by e-mail, and are no less required than paper texts. Therefore, failing to check links provided means not only missing instruction, but also missing needed readings.
Grammar will be taught in this class only occasionally, on an as-needed basis for the whole group. Please contact the instructor if a particular grammar question plagues you.
COURSE OVERVIEW
This course falls roughly into four sections:
An opening exercise exploring the library, personal, professional and Internet materials specialized to each student's field of study. If not familiar with research in the GMU l;ibraries, it is strongly suggested that you attend a free class session with a university librarian. Library skills will produce the first paper of the semester, the Publication and Authority Paper, as well as a review of the materials needed for the second paper, Writing About Metaphors in Your Discipline.
A section comprising three short essays exploring different disciplines within humanities: (1) theatre, (2) concert music and (3) art, sculpture and architecture.
A research component, including a brief proposal for research leading to an independent research project. related to the impact of technology upon each student's field of study or career choice. A student may subsititute a dual submission to another class in his/her major for this project with completion of a form indicating the other professor's permission, and
A virtual poster presentation prepared as a group and involving all group members, exploring an unresolved ethical issue now confronting professionals in the field.
PLEASE NOTE: since the English Department requires a research component in all sections of English 302,
anyone not completing the research project will FAIL THE CLASS.
Students will also participate in a writing group online, using WebCT. Groups will, as much as possible, be determined by field of study, so that members can develop a shared frame of reference with a strong virtual support group. Participation will count as 10% of the course grade. The virtual poster projects will be the final productsof the writing groups.
As explained in "General Education at George Mason University," English 302 is an integral part of the general education curriculum at George Mason. The mission of the General Education Program is to educate, liberate, and broaden the mind, and to instill lifelong love of learning. In conjunction with each students' major program of study and other electives, minors, or certificates, this program seeks to produce graduates with intellectual vision, creative abilities, and moral sensibility, as well as the skills to assure a well-rounded and useable education. The General Education Program seeks four specific goals: 1. General education courses should first ensure that all undergraduates develop skills in information gathering, written and oral communication, and analytical and quantitative reasoning. 2. General education courses should expose students to the development of knowledge by emphasizing major domains of thought and methods of inquiry. 3. General education courses should enable students to attain a breadth of knowledge that supports their specializations and contributes to their education in both personal and professional ways. 4. General education courses should encourage students to make important connections across boundaries (for example: among disciplines; between the university and the external world; between the United States and other countries).
This advanced composition course is designed to help you develop effective written communication and analytical skills, which are critical to the learning of every well-educated student. In addition to requiring a minimum of 3500 written words from each student, the English Department has identified the following objectives for English 302:
- >To prepare students for the diverse demands of writing in a major and in the workplace by building upon the objectives noted for 100/101
- >To introduce students to ways of thinking, organizational techniques and formats typical in certain disciplines through more specialized sections in Business, Humanities, Natural Sciences and Technology, and Social Sciences
- >To help students identify and use research resources (print and electronic) and documentation styles preferred in their major
- >To guide students to appropriate support services, including the Career Development Center and those services listed under goals for 100/101
| INSTRUCTIONAL TYPE | EXAMPLE |
| Direct instruction | Online tutorials, instructional web sites, online writing lab handouts |
| Guided Practice | Online workshops on writing skills, citation formats, analysis of journal articles, grammar and punctuation as needed, etc. These are provided by online writng labs such as Purdue's or GMU's. |
| Online tutorials and mastery exercises | various university web site materials on plagiarism, editing, and documentation |
| Guided and independent research | library orientation with hands-on practice, location of appropriate articles for research review and nonfiction study |
| Group processing activities | editing student drafts, proofreading citation entries, preparation of virtual poster presentation on ethics |
COURSE REQUIREMENTS/GRADING POLICY
In all General Education English classes (English 100, 101, 201 and 302), students must achieve a grade of C or higher to receive credit for the course. Students with averages of C- or lower will receive an NC (No Credit) for the course.
Assignments will carry the following percentage values:
Online quiz on Plagiarism 5%
Online quiz on Netiquette 5%
Artistic Analysis 10%
Theatre or Concert Review 10%
Writing Group Participation 10%
Publication and Authority Paper 15%
Group Poster Presentation 15%
Research Paper 20%
Again, anyone not completing the research project will FAIL THE COURSE
Essential outlines of each assignment, along with goals and grading criteria, are provided as links to the syllabus, which is available both as links from the instructor's home page and on WebCT. For several assignments, it will be essential to have closely read the textbook, which contains both direction and essential questions.
All work is due on the date specified in the syllabus. Unless by prior arrangement with the instructor, late work will be penalized one letter grade for each week or portion thereof and two letter grades thereafter. This penalty cannot be removed from work resubmitted or revised.
In addition, late work may be delayed in being graded and returned to you; delay is usually one week but may be more. Please keep this in mind if planning to resubmit a paper, especially near the end of the semester. No work will be accepted after the date indicated on the syllabus as the last day to submit rewritten assignments.
Since this is an online section, there is no attendance requirement for the class. However, missing any substantial art of writing group activities has the following disadvantages that the student is responsible to overcome:
- missing editing of writing assignments
- lack of workshop preparation in formatting and writing skills
- nonparticipation in writing and presentation groups
- serious lack of consideration and support for other members of one's writing group
Anyone who must unavoidably miss time away from class activities is advised to notify both the instructor and other writing group members as promptly as possible to avoid falling behind and to minimize inconvenience to others
POLICY ON PLAGIARISM
In a research and writing course, it is especially important that students respect the intellectual property of others. Especially in thesciences, integrity of results falls under acute scrutiny from fellow professionals. All students are therefore expected to scrupulously observe all GMU policies as well as individual instructors' guidelines. Please read and observe the English Department's Statement on Plagiarism below.
Plagiarism means using the exact words, opinions, or factual information from another source without giving that source credit. Writers give credit through the use of accepted documentation styles, such as parenthetical citation, footnotes, or end notes; a simple listing of books, articles, and websites is not sufficient. Plagiarism is the equivalent of intellectual robbery and cannot be tolerated in an academic setting.
Student writers are often confused as to what should be cited. Some think that only direct quotations need to be credited. While direct quotations do need citations, so do paraphrases and summaries of opinions or factual information formerly unknown to the writers or which the writers did not discover themselves. Exceptions to this include factual information which can be obtained from a variety of sources, the writers' own insights or findings from their own field research, (what has been called common knowledge). What constitutes common knowledge can sometimes be precarious; what is common knowledge for one audience may be so for another. In such situations, it is helpful to keep the reader in mind and to think of citations as being "reader friendly." In other words, writers provide a citation for any piece of information that they think their readers might want to investigate further. Not only is this attitude considerate of readers, it will almost certainly ensure that writers will not be guilty of plagiarism.
Distance learning relies upon mutual communication and trust, both student to student and student to instructor. It is especially dependent upon students' intellectual honesty and comitment to do their own work without inappropriate assistance. If, however, that trust appears it to have breached, it is with greatest reluctance that the instructor will submit student work for analysis by Turnitin.com, with which GMU has a current contract. Turnitin uses phrase matching software to determine whether information in a student's writing has been attributed to its source(s). If results show consistent lack of attribution, appropriate academic penalties will be applied.
FORMAT
All graded work must be submitted by uploading to the Assignments section of WebCT unless the class has been specifically instructed to do otherwise.
Each assignment has related instructions in a link to that assignment in the online version of the Syllabus. The format for each assignment is presented in the file of instructions. Please refer to the Syllabus itself at http://mason.gmu.edu/~jjohnsto/syllh01s07.htm or find it on our WebCT course file.
Except for the poster project, assignments submitted electronically MUST be in Word (.doc) or Acrobat (.pdf) format, especially if sent as attachments. WebCT and GMU's e-mail will not read Mime, NotePad or WordPerfect documents, and regards zipped documents as possible viruses. Graphic files submitted with or embedded into assignments should be in GIF, TIF or JPEG formats. Any material sent in any of these formats cannot be accepted and may not even arrive.
Finally, any correspondence should be directed to the instructor's GMU e-mail: jjohnsto@gmu.edu. A Google or other search will reveal other e-mail addresses, but all GMU-related correspondence is handled through that address and only that address.
Mail sent to the instructor at other addresses will receive no response.NOTE: Be careful when responding to mail sent to the class list. The Registrar's Office provides the capability to e-mail the whole lass from its online registration site, but requires the sender to use whatever mail program is resident on the machine (s)he is using rather than GMU's mail program, which is web-based. DO NOT reply to the mail address used for class mailings, but to the GMU address above.
STUDENTS WITH DISABILITIES