This is a course in the craft of writing. The word craft is crucial. Writing can be art, and the greatest written works are among humanity’s greatest achievements. Whence the genius for such works derives is an eternal mystery, and one can no more teach someone to be a great novelist, dramatist, or poet than one can teach someone to be the next Joshua Bell or Kevin Durant. But the writing most of us need to perform in order to achieve success in our academic and professional careers, communicate with our colleagues, friends, and the public, and clarify and record our own thinking fortunately does not fall into that mysterious and lofty category. It is more like carpentry: one learns to build a table that will stand solidly on its own, support whatever weight it is supposed to bear, and be aesthetically pleasing. While we may not all be able to produce a Chippendale, all of us can learn to make a serviceable and attractive table — at least a step up from Ikea, let’s say — if we are given the tools and are willing to apply ourselves. Likewise, we can all learn to write prose that helps us achieve our professional goals.

This course participates in the Students as Scholars (SaS) program, a university-wide initiative that encourages undergraduate students to engage in scholarly research.  Across campus, students now have increased opportunities to work with faculty on original scholarship, research, and creative activities, through their individual departments and the George Mason Office of Student Scholarship, Creative Activities, and Research (OSCAR).

At the end of the course, the Office of Institutional Assessment and the Composition Program will collect random samples of students’ final research projects in order to assess the effectiveness of the Students as Scholars Program. This assessment has no bearing on your grade in the course.

As good as The Craft of Research is, the authors (as they state) assume that their readers’ basic writing skills are already flawless, so they do not address issues of grammatical correctness at all, and say little about writing style. Thus, you must own a writer’s handbook. When you make grammatical and stylistic errors, I will point them out and expect you to look them up in a handbook. Some of the better handbooks are Diane Hacker’s Rules for Writers and A Writer’s Reference, Muriel Harris’s Prentice-Hall Reference Guide to Grammar and Usage, and Andrea Lunsford’s The Everyday Writer. Many others are available. I do not care which handbook you own, as long as it is relatively recent. If you do not own any of them, buy one. The primary difference between them is the way they are organized; the material is mostly the same. Some of you may have The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E. B. White, which is short and filled with good advice (although some is idiosyncratic or even a little weird, and its tone and approach are stricter than they should be), but it does not deal with grammar in any comprehensive way, so you should consider it supplemental to these others.

Exercises will be short assignments designed to prepare you for the major essays. In some cases you will complete them at home, bring multiple copies with you to class, and work with them in a peer group, while in others you will complete them in class and then submit them to me by e-mail. If you do not attend class or fail to bring the required number of copies of an exercise with you to class, you cannot get credit for the assignment. I do not accept exercises late.

You will produce three major writing assignments of different types during the semester:

1) Discipline Awareness Project: Periodical Analysis. In this assignment, you will examine two periodicals relevant to your discipline. By examining them both the periodicals as a whole and some of the articles and essays they publish, you will assess their overall orientations, presumed audiences, and purposes.

2) Research Project Part I: Sources, Quotations, Planning, and Thesis. Because this course presents research and writing as a mode of inquiry, you cannot simply present a completed research essay for credit. This assignment — which resembles a particularly compex form of annotated bibliography — requires you do perform all of the intellectual heavy-lifting for a research essay prior to actually writing it. That means gathering not only your sources but finding the specific quotations you plan to use in support of your argument, deciding how you will use them, and deveolping the thesis that will form the essay’s spine. Doing this assignment well will allow you to focus on the essay’s organization, argument, and clarity as the deadline approaches.

3) Research Project Part II: Position Paper. A position paper presents an informed, researched opinion about an issue. In English 302, this paper must be written to a specific audience with the intent to resolve an issue about which people disagree. Position papers often urge a plan of action the audience or stakeholder should take to address the issue.

I believe that learning requires an active engagement on the part of both the students and the teacher. You cannot simply sit back and expect to receive knowledge the way a child receives a tetanus shot. At minimum, you must participate by paying close attention to everything that goes on in class. Ideally, you should also ask questions and risk exposing your ideas to your classmates. A writing class, especially, is a cooperative venture — as much workshop as class — and cannot be conducted primarily via lecture. Also, many of the class’s activities depend on your participation, and failing to contribute fully, whether through absence or lateness, for example, will affect your scores on these assignments. Note this comment from the student handbook: “Students who fail to participate (by virtue of extensive absences) in courses in which participation is a factor in evaluation may have their grades lowered.”

A note about attendance: a healthy percentage of success in life depends simply on showing up where and when you are expected. If you are the kind of student who has trouble showing up, you will struggle in any composition class. On the other hand, students who never miss a class tend to do well in my courses. Note that absences or lateness on the days your peer group meets are particularly disastrous. Even being late for a peer response session will result in a penalty to your peer response grade. Absences in summer courses are particularly bad. Because our course meets only eighteen times, each absence equals almost an entire week of a normal semester. Plus, we are moving so quickly that catching up once you have fallen behind is almost impossible.

Although absences are always bad, if you know ahead of time that you will be absent, you should tell me. Regardless, you are absolutely responsible for finding out what happened in class. I suggest you exchange e-mail addresses with at least two classmates.

Much of this course is conducted as a workshop, which means your peers depend on you. For that reason, the penalties for lateness are severe. Assignments are due when specified. I do not accept exercises late for credit. Lateness on drafts results in major penalties to your peer response grades.

Revisions of the first two major assignments receive a 10% penalty for being late and an additional 10% penalty for every day beyond the first 24 hours, meaning that a revision that you send to me one day and one hour late will receive a 20% penalty to the available points. For the Research Project Part II: Position Paper, because it comes at the very end of the course, I cannot accept revisions late. If you do not submit the revision by the deadline, I will treat the draft you submitted to your peers for peer response as your revision. This will prevent you from earning a zero, but will quite likely result in a low grade.

Class Participation: I assign each class period a point value, which you can see on the Class Calendar. You receive those points if you are in class when class begins at 10:30 and you have brought with you everything you were supposed to for that class (the right number of copies of exercises, drafts, and peer responses, your text and any hand-outs we are going to discuss, and so on). If you are late or in some way not prepared, I reserve the right to reduce the points awarded for the day. Absence means you earn no points, of course. Note that while class participation officially counts for 25 of the 100 points in the class, the total number of points you may earn for being prepared and in class is 28. In other words, you may earn up to 3 points extra credit if you are never absent, late, or unprepared. I will calculate participation points at the end of every week and post your score to Blackboard as a running percentage.

In addition, consistently strong in-class performance will earn students up to a 3 point bonus on their final grade. Students may demonstrate strong in-class participation by joining class discussions, asking appropriate questions, and taking an active role in class activities. 

Exercises: I do not grade exercises. I may comment on them, but provided you follow the instructions and submit an exercise that fulfills them, you will earn 100% credit for them. If you ignore instructions or submit something wholly inadequate, I reserve the right to award you only partial credit. The point of exercises is not to torpedo your GPA; it is to build up what I call writer’s muscle memory. I have consistently found a strong correlation between the effort students put into their exercises and their performance on more major assignments, and thus their final grades.

Peer Responses: I will grade these based primarily on the apparent effort and attention given and their organization and whether you follow the instructions, secondarily on the quality of advice you offer. You may earn anywhere from an A+ (100) to an F (59) on each set of peer responses you submit. Of course, if the set is incomplete or you fail to submit it to your peers on-time, you may earn a lower score.

Discipline Awareness Project: Periodical Analysis and Advanced Research Project, Part I: Sources, Quotations, Planning, and Thesis: For each of these assignments, I will complete a rubric that evaluates your project in many aspects of both content and style. Then, the Content and Style grades will be multiplied (not averaged) together and the resulting percentage will be applied to the points available for the assignment. A reflective commentary can potentially modify the final score on each assignments. More detailed explanation and the rubric itself can be found on the assignment page.

Advanced Research Project, Part II: Research Essay: For this final assignment, I will asssign you two holistic scores, one for Content and one for Style, multiply them together, and the resulting percentage will be applied to the 25 points available for the assignment.

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 endnotes; a simple listing of books, articles, and websites is not sufficient.

This class will include direct instruction in strategies for handling sources as part of our curriculum. However, students in composition classes must also take responsibility for understanding and practicing the basic principles listed below.

To avoid plagiarism, meet the expectations of a U.S. academic audience, give their readers a chance to investigate the issue further, and make credible arguments, writers must

• put quotation marks around and give an in-text citation for any sentences or distinctive phrases (even short, two- or three-word phrases) that writers copy directly from any outside source: a book, a textbook, an article, a website, a newspaper, a song, a baseball card, an interview, an encyclopedia, a CD, a movie, whatever.
• completely rewrite — not just switch out a few words—any information they find in a separate source and wish to summarize or paraphrase for their readers, and also give an in-text citation for that paraphrased information
• give an in-text citation for any facts, statistics, or opinions which the writers learned from outside sources (or which they just happen to know) and which are not considered common knowledge in the target audience (this may require new research to locate a credible outside source to cite)
• give a new in-text citation for each element of information — that is, do not rely on a single citation at the end of a paragraph, because that is not usually sufficient to inform a reader clearly of how much of the paragraph comes from an outside source.

Writers must also include a Works Cited or References list at the end of their essay, providing full bibliographic information for every source cited in their essay.

While different disciplines may have slightly different citation styles, and different instructors may emphasize different levels of citation for different assignments, writers should always begin with these conservative practices unless they are expressly told otherwise. Writers who follow these steps carefully will almost certainly avoid plagiarism. If writers ever have questions about a citation practice, they should ask their instructor.

Instructors in the Composition Program support the George Mason Honor Code, which requires them to report any suspected instances of plagiarism to the Honor Council. All judgments about plagiarism are made after careful review by the Honor Council, which may issue penalties ranging from grade-deductions to course failure to expulsion from GMU.

Students with documented disabilities are legally entitled to request certain accommodations. If you are a student with a disability and you need academic accommodations, please see me and contact the Office of Disability Services (703-993-2474). All academic accommodations must be arranged through the DRC. Students with documented disabilities should present me with a contact sheet from the Disability Resource Center as soon as possible so that together we may plan appropriate accommodations.

Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) provides a wide range of services to faculty, staff and students. Services are provided by a staff of professional counseling and clinical psychologists and professional counselors. The Center provides individual counseling, group counseling, workshops and outreach programs — experiences to enhance a student's academic performance. To make an appointment, visit the CAPS website, call them at 703-993-2380, or go to their office in Student Union I, Room 364.

Office of Diversity, Inclusion, and Multicultural Education supports our diverse student and faculty population. The office is committed to the success of all members of the Mason community. Throughout the year, it sponsors a variety of programs for students and faculty.  It works specifically with African Heritage, Hispanic/Latino, Asian/Pacific American, American Indian, and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning populations. You can access the ODIME website or call 703-993-2700.

Office for Academic Integrity promotes and supports academic integrity throughout the university community by educating its members, fostering an environment where students can be recognized for high levels of integrity, creating opportunities for leadership and personal growth, and upholding the university honor code through a student-based honor committee. You can access the OAI website or call 703-993-6209.