In the university catalog, the general focus of English 302 is described as follows: "Intensive practice in writing and analyzing expository forms such as essay, article, proposal, and technical or scientific reports with emphasis on research related to student’s major field". This course is designed to build on the general writing skills and techniques you have acquired in 101 and other university courses, and to prepare you for completing advanced level writing, analysis and research in your major discipline, in other academic situations you may encounter, and in your possible future workplace.  We will, therefore, practice the various genres of writing you are likely to encounter. Throughout the semester, you will also learn to recognize the way(s) that knowledge is constructed in various disciplines, adapt your writing to common purposes and audience needs, conduct and synthesize research, use computer technologies as part of your research and writing process, and produce writng that employs the organizational techniques and genres typical in each discipline.

English 302 fulfills all or in part the writing-intensive requirements for general education at George Mason Unversity. 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).

Of the six key areas where General Education learning outcomes are reviewed by GMU's Office of Institutional Assessment, English 302 falls under "Written Communication."  
Students who successfully complete one or more writing-intensive courses in their major will be able to:

• Analyze and synthesize course content using methods appropriate to the major;
• Make reasoned, well-organized arguments with introductions, thesis statements, supporting evidence, and conclusions appropriate to the major.
• Use credible evidence, to include, as applicable, data from credible primary and/or secondary sources, integrated and documented accurately according to styles preferred in the major.
• Employ rhetorical strategies suited to the purpose(s) and audience(s) for the writing, to include appropriate vocabulary, voice, tone, and level of formality.
• Produce writing that employs the organizational techniques, formats, and genres (print and/or digital) typical in the major and/or workplace.
• Produce writing that demonstrates proficiency in standard edited American English, including correct grammar/syntax, sentence structure, word choice, and punctuation.

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As explained on the Composition Program website, students who successfully complete ENGH 302 will be able to adapt their reading and writing to meet the expectations of their academic discipline and future workplace. They will be able to demonstrate the ability to

• apply critical reading strategies that are appropriate to advanced reading in their academic discipline and in their possible future workplaces
• recognize how knowledge is constructed in their academic discipline and possible future workplaces, attending to issues such as kinds of claims or questions posed by advanced or professional writers
• evidence considered sufficient to support arguments
• analyze the rhetorical situations—audience, purpose, and context—of texts produced in their academic disciplines and in possible future workplaces
• produce writing—including arguments or proposals—that is appropriate for a range of rhetorical situations within their academic disciplines and possible future workplaces, with particular attention to textual features such as
• common genres
• organizational strategies
• style, tone, and diction
• expected citation formats

By the end of this course students will be able to

• use writing as a tool for exploration and reflection in addressing advanced problems, as well as for exposition and persuasion
• employ strategies for writing as a recursive process of inventing, investigating, shaping, drafting, revising, and editing to meet a range of advanced academic and professional expectations
• identify, evaluate, and use research sources
• employ a range of appropriate technologies to support researching, reading, writing, and thinking
• apply critical reading strategies that are appropriate to advanced reading in your academic discipline and in possible future workplaces
• recognize how knowledge is constructed in your academic discipline and possible future workplaces
• analyze rhetorical situations – audience, purpose, and context – of texts produced in your academic disciplines and possible future workplaces
• produce writing – including argument proposals – that is appropriate for a range of rhetorical situations within your academic disciplines and possible future workplaces

TEXTBOOKS AND MATERIALS FOR THIS COURSE

• A research handbook is required: The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (6th ed.) Washington, DC: APA, 2010. If appropriate, students may instead use MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (7th ed.) New York: MLA, 2009.
• Readings will be done online, using both links provided in the syllabus and material e-mailed to the class by the instructor.  Thus, it will be essential to have regular, reliable computer access and to check e-mail regularly, as well as daily when drafts or finished assignments are due. 
• All assignments are available on the instructor's website (http://mason.gmu.edu/~jjohnsto) at URL's linked to the syllabus. Also, the same material is available in our password-protected course folder at http://courses.gmu.edu. Text summaries of all assignments are therefore available at all times, complete with goals, instructions and grading criteria.
• GMU email account: students must use their Mason email accounts--either the exisitng "MEMO" system or the new "MASONLIVE" account to receive important university information, including messages related to this class. See http://masonlive.gmu.edu for more information.. (IMPORTANT NOTE: any student not regularly using his or her GMU e-mail account must set that account to forward to the student's preferrred e-mail address. Failure to do so will mean that the student will not receive any class notices or the web links needed for class work, which are sent to the class list maintained by the Registrar's Office.)
• The Mozilla Firefox browser, available free from GMU's  IT support web site. Our course software, Classroom Edition 9.1 of the Blackboard Learning System (CE6), often does not display properly or presents problems with uploading and downloading on Internet Explorer.  Also, Firefox is far more resistant to viruses and other malfunctions.  Mac users should use the Safari browser to avoid similar problems.
  
• Willingness and ability to use GMU's libraries in Fenwick, the Johnson Center, and if necessary the Prince William and Law School campuses, plus possibly the Washington Research Library Consortium. Students new to GMU's libraries may receive free orientation sessions, which the library staff provides near the beginning of each semester. See the calendar of orientation sessions. 

Optional materials include:

•  Please be aware that  instruction will NOT be provided for CSE, Anthropology or engineering formats; only MLA and APA will  be taught. Students are responsible for correct MLA, APA, Engineering, Anthropology, CBE or Chicago format for all papers, whether or not the text is purchased. If using an older edition of the MLA or APA Handbooks, be aware that you are responsible for updating your formatting to reflect the changes made in the 7th edition, issued April 2009. Each was issued in spring 2009, then amended during the summer.
• If you have not used Blackboard CE6 previously, review the tutorial immediately.
  
• The User's Guide to Mason is available in the Copy Shop (Room 117 in the Johnson Center) for those unfamiliar with GMU's computer support, at a cost of about $1.00.
• Diana Hacker's A Pocket Style Manual is an abridged but cheaper version of our course text.

NOTE: Online readings on the syllabus are no less required than paper texts are in other classes, while others may be e-mailed to you.

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WHAT IS A SCHOLAR?  (750-1000 words; 15% of course grade)
This assignment begins the exploration of the course theme, SCHOLAR 2.0.  It asks students to participate in an intellectual conversation about the nature and purpose of scholarship, to share these insights and additional resources with others, to do some individual research on the topic and to situate themselves both in George Mason’s QEP initiative and in the larger scholarly community.  Following the completion of a researched essay on these issues, the assignment adds a metacognitive review of the role of blogging on the development of their thought.  The assignment file on Blackboard contains detailed instructions for completion.

HOW SCHOLARS KNOW ABOUT THE PAST: LITERATURE REVIEW (250 words; 15% of course grade)
This assignment combines multiple goals. First, it reviews the appropriate documentation format for your field, beginning research while expanding the use of academic databases beyond consulting those appropriate to a student’s field to also include identify database(s) appropriate to the particular research tasks the student has identified. It scaffolds the next assignment, the research project, as students gather resources they can use for that paper.  Composing the review serves to integrate persuasive writing techniques, revision for persuasion and concision and paragraph construction as well as requiring higher level thinking as students synthesize the articles they have found to come to a greater understanding of the state of knowledge on a larger issue. The assignment file on Blackboard contains detailed instructions for completion.

WEB 2.0 AND SCHOLARSHIP (1500 words; 20% of course grade)
This assignment allows you to synthesize all the major elements of your learning this semester:

• Synthesis writing
• The function and identity of a scholar, based on Boyer’s model
• Standards and expectations for research in your field of study, including evaluation of types of source and requirements for credibility
• The use of the appropriate documentation format for your discipline
• Use of appropriate vocabulary, sentence structure and organizational patterns for college-level writing
• Tone and diction appropriate to a scholar in your field
  

 At the same time, it offers an opportunity to expand the functionality of a scholar into the 21^st century by projecting ways that scholarship can be conducted and enhanced by web 2.0 devices such as blogs, wikis, Facebook, phone photography, e-journals, document sharing, site creators, LinkedIn or Twitter. The assignment file on Blackboard contains detailed instructions for completion.

IN addition, graded short exercises include the following:

• Netiquette Quiz (5% of course grade)
• Integrating and Punctuating Quotations Quiz (5% of course grade)
• Transitions and Connectors Quiz (5% of course grade)
• Plagiarism Test (7% of course grade)
• blog postings for "What Is a Scholar?" (5% of course grade)
• Draft conference for research paper (5% of course grade)
• Metacognitive Writing for Research Paper (3% of course grade)
  

All assignments are listed below, in order of their percentage values out of 100%.

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.

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COURSE COMPLETION AND GRADING POLICIES

• For Spring 2012, the Last Day to Add or to Drop without tuition penalty is Tuesday, Jan 31; 
• the absolutely Last Day to Drop is Friday, Feb. 24.  Both are marked on our syllabus.  After the last day to drop a class, withdrawing from this class requires the approval of the Dean and is only allowed for nonacademic reasons.  Undergraduate students may choose to exercise a selective withdrawal.  
• The selective withdrawal option may be used no more than three times in a student's undergraduate career at George Mason and must be completed within the selective withdrawal period. For Spring 2012, the period lasts from Feb. 27 to March 30.  See the GMU Schedule of Classes for selective withdrawal procedures.

ENGLISH 302 GRADING POLICY:  It is University policy that in all General Education English classes (English 100, 101, 201 and 302), students must achieve a grade of C (73) or higher to receive credit for the course. Students with averages of C- or lower will receive an NC (No Credit) for the course and must repeat it.  It is also the policy of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences that once final grades have been recorded, instructors should never accept any additional work from a student to change a grade. 

COURSE GRADING POLICY:   In grading essays, I use the following general criteria:

• a "C" level grade (70-79%) denotes average college-level writing and achievement.  The essay is a competent response to the assignment:  it meets, to some degree, all the assignment requirements, and demonstrates that the author has put significant time and effort into communicating his/her ideas to his/her targeted audience.  It has a thesis, presents some support, and moves from point to point in an orderly fashion; sentence-level errors do not significantly prevent comprehension.  Essays that do not meet these criteria will not earn a "C."

•  A "B" level grade (80-90%) highlights a strong example of college writing and thinking.  In addition to meeting the "C" level requirements, such an essay goes further in some way(s): it demonstrates some insight into the "gray areas" of the topic, provides original or very thorough support that is tightly woven into the overall argument, reads smoothly at both the sentence and paragraph levels, and/or exhibits a personal "voice" or style.  It has few sentence-level errors.

•  An "A" level grade (90-100%) marks an essay that is a delight for the reader.  Even more than in a "B" essay, its author anticipates and responds to possible reader questions, uses a wide range of supporting evidence, engages the reader in a provocative conversation, provides unexpected insights, and/or uses language with care and facility.

• "D" and "F" level essays do not meet the basic expectations of the assignment.

LATE WORK POLICY: 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. You should retain all graded files until the final course grade appears on your transcript at the end of the semester. 

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.

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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, either in our class Blackboard folder or at http://mason.gmu.edu/~jjohnsto/syllm14s12.html

Essay assignments submitted electronically MUST be in Word (.doc or .docx) format. Because they cannot be written on, PDF files prevent ths instructor from grading the assignment. GMU's e-mail will not read Mime, NotePador WordPerfect documents, and regards zipped documents as possible viruses. Therefore, any material sent in any of these formats cannot be accepted and may not even arrive. If using a Mac or Open Office or equivalent, it is the student's responsibility to make sure that his/her assignments can be read in Word 2007. 

Finally, any REVISED assignments or 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 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 class 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. If trying to reach the instructor, DO NOT reply to the mail address used for class mailings, but to the GMU address above.

 If you are frequently late, you may miss in-class writngs and will definitely miss collaborative activities.  However, in an emergency I would rather have you come late than not at all; if you get stuck in traffic but you can get here 20 minutes late, please try to come anyway.

 You should be actively present.  This implies brain awareness as well as the basic courtesies of formal social gatherings.  Students who are sleeping, reading the newspaper, carrying on private conversations, answering or texting on cell phones, or working on assignments for other classes (etc.) are not wholly, actively present and thus may lose class participation points for that day.  If you are seriously unprepared for class or group work—having absolutely no draft for a draft workshop, for example—you may lose class participation points for that day.  Any serious breach of good classroom conduct may cause you to lose all participation points.

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