Guidelines for English 1101 at KSU

English 1101: Composition I is a writing course. Its purpose is to help students learn to express their ideas and thoughts in written English. Teachers of English 1101 will be cognizant of the diverse and various language experiences of incoming students as they introduce students to academic writing. The course may—and probably will—include computer technologies, grammar and usage, the conventions of print and script, literary texts, and/or research, but it is primarily a writing course, with emphasis on the students' texts.

Thus, students in English 1101 should become familiar with writing as an intellectual recursive process, including especially strategies for invention, arrangement, and revision. From this course, students should take a repertoire of writing strategies—from generating ideas, to planning, to drafting, to revising, to editing and proofreading. In order to teach process, instructors employ such strategies as peer reviews and peer editing groups, in-class practice on various parts of the essay, revision techniques, and so forth. Lessons on process can be reinforced through the Writing Center.

Students should learn in English 1101 that any piece of writing, even and especially their own, must have a rhetorical purpose in order to be successful. Students should learn to take into account audience and context as they formulate their own stance. Helpful here are the aims of discourse—referential, exploratory, expressive, literary, and persuasive. Students should learn that aims are prior to such methods of development as description, narration, process analysis, classification, etc.

English 1101 students should learn the basic elements of rhetoric: claim, reason, evidence. They should learn that the main claim, or thesis, does not merely name the topic, but rather states a position on an issue. They should learn that a thesis is not a fact, but rather a judgment that can be defended. They should learn that the organization of the rest of the paper is derived from the thesis. They should learn that while a blueprint, or forecasting, sentence may be helpful in a long paper, such a sentence is not generally necessary in the relatively short essays written in English 1101. Students should have access to a textbook that covers process, rhetoric, and argument.

While researched essays are not the focus of English 1101, students should nonetheless become familiar with Galileo; the librarians offer tutorials every semester. Students should also learn the rudiments of quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing. It is the responsibility of all writing teachers to bring the ethics of language use into class discussion.

The academic essay is the major focus of English 110l, but it should not be the only writing students do. Students should be asked to write other, sometimes less formal or expressive pieces, such as reading journals, free writes, response papers, peer reviews, short in-class discussions, letters, memos, reports, and so forth. Preparing oral reports, leading class discussion, or contributing to it in a substantive way also require skills necessary in writing. Although instructors should not "teach to the [Regents'] test," it is appropriate for teachers in 1101 occasionally to assign an impromptu timed-writing.

Because students need to read smart things in order to write smart papers, instructors of English 1101 will carefully select readings so that students can read both substantially and critically. Students should do sustained reading on a few topics rather than reading in a scattershot sort of way. Many anthologies offer units on a variety of topics. A non-fiction book might serve as well as several essays on a particular topic. While it is true that at Kennesaw State University neither English 1101 nor 1102 is a literature course, it is certainly possible to use a novel (as long as it is appropriate in length and style—Moll Flanders is neither—and as long as the instructor is aware of the proliferation of literary analysis papers on the Internet). Full-length books, including novels, as well as any other material not on the textbook list should be approved by the director of composition. Titles of all books should appear on the syllabus/policy statement.

In an age in which the technologies of literacy are rapidly changing, English 1101 students should be required to use electronic media: word processing of course, but also email, electronic discussion (via WebCT or other programs), or producing documents incorporating both text and images. While document design is not the focus of English 1101, instructors may find that teaching the basic elements will enhance student writing.

Learning to edit and proofread, students in English 1101 should focus on the most important conventions of print. Specifically, they should learn to recognize and correct such sentence boundary problems as fragments, run-ons, and comma-splice errors. Students should be introduced here to the idea that sentence structure, usage, and punctuation are part of their rhetoric. Students in English 1101 should buy an appropriate handbook and be taught to use it as a resource in correcting infelicities marked by the instructor. Realizing that many people confuse correctness with good writing and that the notion of correctness often stifles students' intellectual work, instructors in 1101 will be judicious in marking papers and in taking class time to teach grammatical conventions. Referring students to the Writing Center can help here.

The inevitable question for a writing course is How many papers? In the olden days, we are told, students wrote an essay (or theme) every two weeks, typically in class. However, in the olden days, students were not expected to write multiple drafts. Thus our answer is that if students take essays through multiple drafts wherein they are doing real revision, not just editing or proofreading, and if they are writing informally as well, they should write the equivalent of four to five essays, that is, between 7000 and 11,000 words.

(approved Composition Subcommittee, Spring 05; approved PAC, Fall 05)

Guidelines for English 1102 at KSU

English 1102 at Kennesaw State University extends and reinforces the objectives in English 1101, but focuses on writing from sources. At the end of the course, the instructor should be able to certify that students can write at an acceptable level in the university; that is, this course should prepare students to write, read, and think in ways that will allow them to do the academic work that they will be assigned across the university. Thus students at KSU should sit for the Regents Essay Examination during their 1102 course.

Students who finish 1102 should be able to think through competing claims; apply a theoretical concept in order to evaluate or interpret phenomenon; find outside sources on a particular topic; organize information in a paper that is unified, coherent, and free of the most egregious surface infelicities; and use the conventions of a system of documentation accurately. Chiefly, however, students should be able to write about the complexity of an issue.

Readings for 1102 should come from across the disciplines. While it is certainly acceptable to use a literary work, or one that has had "literariness thrust upon it," as critic Terry Eagleton puts it, this course is not, as it is in many universities, an introduction to literature. It is rather a writing course that introduces students to some of the ways knowledge is created at the university. One goal of the course, therefore, is to introduce students to texts and genres across the curriculum.

Another goal is to introduce students to the different kinds of evidence that disciplines use to construct their arguments. As English faculty, we are not trained nor are we expected to teach students how to write advanced papers in their majors. And we certainly cannot teach a course in research methods that will prepare students for any eventuality they may encounter at the university. It is sociology's job to teach students to do sociological research and to write upper-level papers in sociology, just as it is the task of literature professors to teach students to carry out literary research and then to write literary criticism. It is our task to show students that not all texts are the same and that not all academic arguments rely on the same methods.

Two main approaches seem to be prevalent among instructors of 1102 at Kennesaw State University. One is the "research" approach. Many instructors who take this approach either use or have used Ballenger's The Curious Researcher. Here students read about a given broad topic –like community, or place, or work—and then spend most of the semester using various research methods to explore that topic. As students research, they write reports on their research, analyze what particular sources mean, reflect on the relevance of the research, compose annotated bibliographies, deliver oral presentations, write extended arguments, and so forth.

The other approach is more "text-based." Many who take this approach focus on a particular topic—like the Ideal Society, Language and Self, Death and Dying—using readings from across several disciplines, either collected by the instructor or by the makers of "across the disciplines" anthologies. Students use those common readings to write various kinds of papers that critique, evaluate, analyze, and synthesize sources. Students then are asked to go beyond the assigned texts and search for sources that allow them to extend their arguments on the topic. Here, again, students write reports on their research, freewrite on what they are learning, compose annotated bibliographies, deliver oral presentations, write extended arguments integrating sources, and so forth.

Despite the emphasis on reading and on research, English 1102 is still primarily a writing course. The purpose of the readings and the research is to engage students in the academic enterprise, but the main purpose of the course is to teach students to write in ways that are acceptable in the academic community. Thus, we use invention exercises, peer groups, multiple drafts, freewrites, editing lessons, and so forth—all the pedagogical techniques we know or can devise to help students learn that what they write is better when it goes through a complex, recursive process.

The course thus reinforces and extends lessons on rhetoric—purpose, audience, genre, style, and voice. Perhaps the most important lesson we can teach in 1102 is that the student counts in this enterprise—her voice, his curiosity, the answers she finds, his relationship with the audience, the topic she selects, the research question he formulates, the thesis she composes over time. That is, we help students to do their own intellectual work rather than merely to hand in assignments. Thus we use class time to discuss explicitly the ethics of language use and academic integrity, and we teach them how to construct texts in ways that will uphold their integrity.

For most instructors at Kennesaw State, teaching a "research project"—wherein there are many phases and different kinds of student texts supervised by the teacher—or teaching a "researched essay"—wherein students write a sustained, clear, critically thought-out argument supported by a variety of sources—is more productive than teaching the "research paper"—wherein, at worst, students merely download a paper from the internet or, at best, hand in a patchwork quilt of quotations. Many instructors find it more effective to assign a number of small papers than one very long paper at the end. Ideally, the final paper should be a culmination of work done throughout the semester.

(approved Composition Subcommittee, Spring 05; approved PAC, Fall 05)