UNIVERSITY OBJECTIVES FOR ENGLISH 302
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).
ENGLISH DEPARTMENT OBJECTIVES FOR ENGLISH 302
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's Composition Program has identified the following objectives for all sections of 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
TEXTBOOKS AND MATERIALS FOR THIS COURSE
- The text for this class is Robert DiYanni's Writing About the Humanities (3rd ed.) Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2008.
- Additional 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 computer access and to check e-mail at the beginning of each week, 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
computer account (free to students) with user ID and password, or other
working e-mail account. Students who do not begin the semester with an
account should apply on-line or in person on the
- 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:
- A research handbook, either the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (5th ed.) for students in the sciences or social sciences, or the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (6th ed.) for students in the humanities. Both are available on-line if preferred (links are given in the syllabus) or can be purchased from the GMU bookstore, Barnes and Noble, Waldenbooks, Borders, etc. Please be aware that since this is a natural sciences section, instruction will be provided for APA, CBE and engineering formats ONLY; MLA will not be taught. Students are responsible for correct MLA, APA or Chicago format for all papers, whether or not the text is purchased.
- 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 Writer's Reference is recommended for those seeking a highly readable handbook of correct grammar and English usage. Her A Pocket Style Manual is an abridged but cheaper version of the same thing.
NOTE: Online readings are no less required than paper texts, while others will be e-mailed to you before class.
Grammar will be taught in this class only occasionally, on an as-needed basis. Please consult the instructor if a particular grammar question plagues you.
METHODS OF INSTRUCTION
COURSE REQUIREMENTS AND GRADING PERCENTAGES
| PERCENTAGE | ASSIGNMENT | DUE DATE |
| 5% | Netiquette Quiz | 2/1 |
| 5% | Plagiarism Test | 2/23 |
| 5% | Research Proposal | 4/14 |
| 10% | Artistic Analysis | 3/21 |
| 10% | Theatre or Concert Review | 4/4 |
| 15% | Publication and Authority Paper | 2/8 |
| 15% | Design, Image and Subtext in Public Spaces | 2/28 |
| 15% | Participation in Writing Groups | ends 4/23 |
| 20% | Research Project | 4/25 |
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.
COURSE GRADING POLICIES
COMPLETION POLICY: All final essays must be involve one or more earlier drafts submitted to the writing group within our class folder, located at http://courses.gmu.edu. You must complete all essay assignments to earn a "C" or higher; to pass at all requires completion of the Research Project, as noted above.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 (75) or higher to receive credit for the course. Students with averages of C- or lower will receive an NC (No Credit) for the course
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."
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"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.
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.
REVISION POLICY: At the end of the term, the student may select ONE essay to revise for a new grade. This is an OPTIONAL acitivity. The revision must demonstrate attention to the instructor's comments and the grading rubric. It must show substantial change to the focus, support, approach and/or organization of the essay in addition to comprehensive error correction, or it will be returned with no grade change. Revision should use the graded file as the base document, leaving all marks by the professor undisturbed while clearly indicating changes made by the student. To submit, e-mail the file to the professor by the due date.
FORMATTING ASSIGNMENTS FOR SUBMISSION
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/syllh29s08.html
Assignments submitted electronically MUST be in Word (.doc) format. Because they cannot be written on, PDF files prevent ths instructor from grading the assignment. GMU's e-mail will not read Mime, NotePad or 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.
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 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.
Return to Top of PageATTENDANCE AND CLASS PARTICIPATION
Since this section is conducted entirely online, attendance is not graded in this class. However, missing any substantial art of class instruction or activities has the following disadvantages that the student is responsible to overcome:
- missing instructions for writing assignments
- lack of 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
10 graded activities x 10 points each = 100 possible points
Be aware that writing is a time-intensive activity. It is thus very difficult to make up any significant amount of lost time. Anyone who must unavoidably miss class activities is advised to notify the instructor as promptly as possible to avoid falling behind.
ENGLISH DEPARTMENT POLICY
ON PLAGIARISM AND ACADEMIC HONESTY
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. Consult the George Mason Honor Code for more information.
Learning—especially writing--relies upon mutual communication and trust, both student to student and student to instructor. It is especially dependent upon students' intellectual honesty and commitment 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.
STUDENTS
WITH DISABILITIES
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There are five major essay assignments for this course: the Publication and Authority paper, the Artistic Analysis, the Public Spaces paper, the Concert or Theatre review and the Research Project. Each has an instruction file linked to from the syllabus for the course; each file contains goals, skills developed by the assignment, procedures to complete the assignment, and grading criteria. There are also help files supplementing each assignment, designed to provide support in locating materials and/or developing needed critical analysis and research skills.
IN addition, there are two online quizzes: the Netiquette quiz and the Plagiarism test. Each contains tutorial material and is self-grading. Finally, a Research Proposal is required before submitting the Research Project. It has an associated instruction file similar to those for the essays listed above.
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Return to the Syllabus for Section H29, Spring 2008
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