Roosevelt University - Writing Program - ENG 101, Introduction to Composition
Instructor Resources
for ENG 101
(Introduction to Composition)
Roosevelt University
Compiled by Priscilla Perkins
Director of Composition
rev. 7/03
Contents
ENG 101: A Course Description ............................................................................ 2
Who takes ENG 101? .................................................................................................................. 2
Basic requirements of ENG 101 ................................................................................................ 3
ENG 101 picks up where ENG 100 leaves off ........................................................................ 4
Approaches to reading in 101 ................................................................................................... 5
Approaches to writing in 101 ..................................................................................................... 5
What makes an ENG 101 assignment effective? ................................................................... 6
Approaches to revision in 101 ................................................................................................... 7
Writing effective comments on papers ................................................................................... 8
Approaching grammar and mechanical instruction in 101 ................................................. 8
The final exam in 101 .................................................................................................................. 9
Official grading rubric for ENG 101 ...................................................................................... 11
............................................................................... Understanding ENG 101 grading criteria 11
................................................................... Features of 101 papers from every grade range 13
Sample Classroom Resources for ENG 101 .......................................................... 17
.......................................................................... First-day writing sample passages 18
.......................................................................... Making connections between texts 20
...................................................... Turning class discussion into material for writing 21
............................................................................................. A “framing” exercise 22
................................................................. Examples of effective essay assignments 23
............................................................................................... Revision task sheets 24
................................................................................................... “Seed” exercises 26
ENG 101: A Course Description
Roosevelt’s course catalog says this about ENG 101 (Introduction to Composition):
Instruction and practice in analytical reading, expository writing, and revision strategies. Introduces techniques for developing arguments based on multiple sources.
This description is straightforward, but it doesn’t give teachers or students a sense of the day-to-day work of ENG 101 or the Composition Program’s anticipated learning outcomes for the course. A more detailed description might emphasize the following features and goals of ENG 101:
Picking up where ENG 100 (Basic Writing Practice) leaves off, ENG 101 asks students to read and respond in writing to texts that approximate, both in length and difficulty, many of the texts that they will encounter in their 100 and 200-level courses across the university. Sections of ENG 101 usually work from a published anthology of readings (see attached list of suggested textbooks); instructors assign sequences of readings that may be related by topic or discursive/rhetorical style, and, after class discussion and/or other activities, students write multi-drafted essays that 1) explore the issues raised in the readings, 2) make connections between the readings themselves and/or between the readings and their own life experiences, 3) show a developing sense of how and why writers construct arguments. The course’s primary emphases on reading, drafting, and revision, combined with the instructor’s individualized attention to both “macro” (content, meaning, organization) and “micro” (sentence-level correctness, punctuation, mechanics) writing issues, prepare students for success in ENG 102 (Argumentation, Analysis, Research) and other university courses in which writing is important.
Who takes ENG 101?
Many transfers to RU take ENG 101 before they enroll here, while high scores on the RUA (Roosevelt University Assessment) test allow other students to bypass the course and go directly to ENG 102. Of the students who make up the typical 101 section, several will be new students who have never taken a college writing course; others will have just finished our ENG 100 course or completed ELP 110 (the final course in RU’s program for non-native speakers of English). In order to tailor instruction as closely and quickly as possible to students’ specific needs, instructors should ask students to list the writing courses they’ve already taken (the end of a first-day writing sample is a good, relatively private place for students to offer this information).
Basic requirements of ENG 101
All sections of ENG 101 must require the following:
1) The use of either a mass-published anthology of appropriate academic readings for ENG 101 or a teacher-assembled, campus bookstore-vended coursepack of copyright-cleared photocopies.
2) The use of Lynn Troyka’s Simon and Schuster Handbook for Writers, 6th ed. (As a program, we may revisit this choice of handbooks in the near future, but right now, it’s used in both 101 an 102.)
3) Five out-of-class essays, most (if not all) of which should be produced through a process that involves at least one rough draft before the final, graded draft is due, for a semester-long total of at least 25 pages of passing writing (or about 6250 words).
4) A final essay exam, designed and independently graded by each ENG 101 instructor.
In order to help classes run smoothly, minimize administrative problems, and maintain consistency among sections of ENG 101, the following information should appear on all instructors’ syllabi:
*Your contact information and preferred modes of out-of-class communication
*A list of required texts (a reading anthology and the Troyka handbook)
*The weights of each assignment and course activity, as well as your policies about rough drafts, peer revision sessions, and rewrites
*The Composition Program attendance policy: Students must attend class. Students who miss more than three once-a-week meetings or six twice-a-week meetings for any reason risk failing the class, even if their work is passing (instructors may consult with the program director in unusual situations). Because emergencies (personal or family illness, job problems, funerals, car troubles), cannot, by definition, be planned or predicted, students need to save their allowed absences for truly unavoidable circumstances. Of course, for maximum learning, the goal is for students to attend every class meeting.
*A statement about ADA compliance: Students who believe they may need accommodation for a documented disability should contact the instructor at the beginning of the semester.
*The university’s policies on plagiarism and academic integrity (available for printing and duplication on the Roosevelt Intranet)
*Your policies about classroom courtesy (cell phones and pagers; respectful listening; punctuality; food and drink in the classroom, etc.)
*A statement that policies, assignments, and due dates are subject to change.
Remember that students (and some courts of law!) tend to treat college syllabi like legal contracts. Spelling out your expectations will undoubtedly save you headaches and grade appeals.
More detailed information about the assumptions and pedagogy behind ENG 101
ENG 101 picks up where ENG 100 leaves off
Instructors who generally teach ENG 101 may not know what recent ENG 100 “graduates” have been working on in Basic Writing Practice. Familiarity with ENG 100 is important, though, because it suggests appropriate places for instructors to begin their semester’s work in 101. (This is not to suggest, of course, that all students coming out of 100 have “mastered” the whole range of competencies stressed in that course. Most still need a lot of practice in order to become confident academic writers.) For more information about Roosevelt’s ENG 100 pedagogy, ask for copies of Instructor Resources for ENG 100 and Student-Centered Resources for ENG 100, both available from the Director of Composition.
At the end of ENG 100, we expect the student to have
*The ability to make her/his own point, and keep that point moving through the paper, at least at a rudimentary level.
*Some sense of academic paper writing conventions: the basic ability to make paragraphs; contextualization of the authors' ideas and his/her own ideas; integration of quotations into her/his text.
*Connections between ideas that clearly make sense, even if they are rudimentary. Those connections need to go beyond similarity or comparison/contrast.
*The ability to demonstrate good reading comprehension.
*Sentence-level error more or less under control.
By the end of ENG 100, students regularly work with academic readings of 7-12 pages. Instructors are urged to assign mainly texts from various academic disciplines and substantive journalistic pieces (lengthy magazine articles rather than newspaper op-ed columns, for example); the occasional piece of short fiction or personal memoir can offer a new context for reading analytically-oriented texts, but the bulk of reading assignments in 100 feature explicitly “academic” prose. What does this mean for students in 101? These students should also be reading challenging, even ambiguous texts from the academic disciplines and idea-oriented journalism. While they may have started by responding to a single reading, by the end of the term, “successful” 100 students have been writing in response to two or sometimes even three readings in a single assignment. ENG 101 students, therefore, should be working closely with two or more sources from the beginning of the course. Through most of the term, these sources should come from the class reading anthology or course packet; as the semester closes, some instructors prepare their students for ENG 102 by requiring them to locate 2-3 “outside” sources in a graded essay assignment.
Approaches to reading in 101
In the academy, people look at reading, research, and writing as a kind of “conversation.” Theories or research projects are developed in response to work that has already been shared, either publically or among close colleagues; critique (often supportive but sometimes contentious) is an expected part of the process.
In 101, then, teachers can foreground the “conversational” aspects of the reading students do, by helping them analyze how published writers work with their sources (what’s “already been said”), try to persuade or even provoke their intended readers, and suggest new avenues for talk and research. Class discussion activities (in which students are encouraged to question and/or build on their peers’ comments) can model this approach to reading. As in ENG 100, students should practice finding, applying, and adapting central terms from the readings to the new contexts suggested by the essay assignments their teachers give. Once students have located an important concept (for example, the idea of “authority” in a reading about politics or education), instructors should help them trace how the significance of the term evolves throughout the reading, or how it changes from one reading to another.
Approaches to writing in 101
Though some instructors find it useful to help students identify the traditional rhetorical “modes” (narrative, exposition, description, comparison/contrast, etc.) at work in their course readings, writing assignments should emphasize the production and exploration of ideas, rather than the imitation of rhetorical models. (Instructors should be aware that composition reading anthologies that are organized by rhetorical modes usually feature texts that have been radically edited in order to conform to the mode emphasized in that section of the book. To see this distorting process at work, check how differently the same reading can be presented in three different anthologies. Seeing how editors amputate writers’ ideas and textual structures to fit into arbitrary rhetorical categories should make instructors more comfortable about exposing students to the broad and often “messy” strategies that successful writers use as they create their texts.)
Student essay structure and organization, by the same token, should be dictated by the ideas that the student is working with, rather than by an arbitrarily predetermined structural “formula” (like the five-paragraph essay). Students coming directly from high-school English classes may have particular trouble breaking away from the five-paragraph “recipe”; in their comments on these students’ papers, instructors should invite these students to consider alternative interpretations, and “unpack” concepts by applying them to relevant new contexts from the readings, current events, or their own experiences. Sometimes students just need to know that they have the instructor’s permission to try new ways of thinking and writing.
Whenever possible, 101 instructors should use informal writing activities to help students generate materials for their graded essays. For example, students can:
*Write down what they already know (or wonder) about a subject before they tackle a reading. Getting preconceptions down on paper can help students sort out what’s new to them about a writer’s ideas.
*Write about a part of the reading or assignment that confuses them. Getting questions down on paper can help students make sense of ideas or writing styles that seem “foreign.” When writing individually doesn’t clear up their thinking, having questions on paper can help them ask their classmates or instructor for more focused assistance (for instance, instead of complaining “I have no idea what this writer is talking about,” she can say “I’m confused about the difference between ‘prescriptive’ grammar and ‘descriptive’ grammar in this reading”).
*Create written connections between seemingly unrelated passages from two or more course readings (see the “seed” exercises in the Sample Classroom Resources). This kind of writing is especially helpful for students who are trying to develop an argument (or “thesis”) for an essay assignment.
What makes an ENG 101 assignment effective?
ENG 101 instructors can elicit the consistently strongest writing from the largest number of students if they give students concrete writing assignments that ask a real question. While a handful of students thrive when they’re given freedom to construct their own essay responses without guidelines or constraints, many students simply flounder under these conditions—a disheartening situation for any teacher, and one which makes it difficult to grade for anything but surface error and organization. Teachers who are serious about helping their students learn to think and write critically, then, will use the class readings as the basis for assignments that do the following:
*Ask a real (not rhetorical) question about the issues raised in the texts. The question should be open-ended, in the sense that there will be multiple ways of responding, but should direct students to work actively with specific textual passages that help them construct their essay responses.
*Are clearly worded: they unambiguously describe the central task and any subtasks involved in the assignment, set out a minimum length for each draft required, and specify due dates.
*Are neutral: they don’t suggest a “right” or politically acceptable response, but do stress that there is no right answer. This kind of unbiased assignment elicits less biased and more exploratory writing from students.
*Encourage controversy without setting students up for unproductive pro-con debate or simplistically autobiographical responses. Asking real questions means that students will respond in ways that are true to their own experiences and values, but that also work actively with the texts they’ve read (without which they can’t hope to answer the teacher’s genuine question).
See Sample Classroom Resources for examples of short, effective essay assignments.
Approaches to revision in 101
*After students have workshopped a draft of an essay, instructors can build substantive revision practice into an assignment by adding another reading or question for students to consider as they complete a second or final draft. This strategy is especially helpful for students who treat revision as a mostly “cosmetic” process, as they must rethink central parts of their essays in order to deal with the new context.
*In order to make peer group revision sessions an effective learning experience for students, teachers should avoid commenting directly on rough drafts, as students invariably ignore what their peers have said once a teacher touches a draft. (The exception to this general rule is when students come to your office hours for a one-on-one draft session). If your students balk at using their peers’ responses as the basis for their essay revisions, discuss the “10 Common Myths About ENG 101" with them.
*Especially at the beginning of the term, draft sessions can be more focused and go “deeper” into the problems that students are having if instructors hand out sheets with specific revision tasks for students to complete. Having students turn in commented-on drafts with their final drafts can help instructors evaluate how well the workshopping process is going. Once a teacher has seen how complete (or incomplete) students’ responses are to each other’s work, s/he can refine the revision tasks or regroup students to match particular strengths and needs. (See the revision task sheets in the Sample Classroom Resources section of this handbook for examples of appropriately specific but open-ended questions for revision groups.)
*Once they’ve worked on the content and structure of a draft, most students still need to revise for clarity and correctness. All 101 students are required to use the Simon and Schuster Handbook; some are familiar with the format of such guides and can use them independently, while others may feel intimidated and lost by the scope of the guide and its less-than-intuitive organization. Instructors have developed many innovative, empathetic ways to help students find their way through their guidebooks (see sample classroom resources for one example). Generally speaking, what does not work is simply to write the name of an error (“pronoun antecedent agreement,” for example) in the margin of a draft and expect the student to find the error in her guide, digest the explanation and sample sentences, and then locate additional examples of the error in her own draft. Most students with consistent sentence-level error problems need one-on-one work with a teacher or tutor in order to gain gradual control over their patterns of error.
Writing effective comments on papers
Few things are more frustrating to struggling or accomplished student writers than getting back essays with only a few vague comments and a grade. Neglecting to tell students in specific terms what does and doesn’t work in their papers–not just at the mechanical level, but in terms of content and rhetoric–dampens students’ motivation to improve their writing. If they perceive that you are truly “listening” to their ideas and are committed to helping them improve their critical thinking and writing skills, they will work harder. In addition to marginal comments that ask specific questions about content and make mechanical or stylistic suggestions, narrative comments that sum up the instructor’s response to an essay and indicate directions for improvement are one of our most important teaching tools.
Having said this, too many comments, or ones that are overly broad, can be almost as bad as no comments at all. Especially with students who have a lot of hard work ahead of them, it’s important to emphasize only one or two areas for improvement on each essay. Just as it makes little sense to overwhelm a student by “bloodying” her paper with red ink (chances are, she’s making just a few errors, but she’s making them over and over), it’s counterproductive to list all of the problems in a paper in your narrative comments. A teacher can even write something like this: “While your paper suggests many areas for improvement, right now, I want you to concentrate on connecting your examples more firmly to your overall goals in the essay. When it comes to the mechanical aspects of your writing, I’d like you to work on your pattern of comma splices; I’ve marked the first few, and I’ll help you find others when you come to my office hours.”
Finding one positive aspect of the student’s paper–an especially appropriate example from the text or a sign that he is figuring out how to spot a pattern of error–is encouraging for both the student and you. Limiting your discussion of both positives and negatives to the most glaring keeps students from becoming more confused and it helps you approach your students’ work responsibly without getting overwhelmed yourself.
Approaching grammar and mechanical instruction in 101
1) Students who have worked their way through ESL programs, either at Roosevelt or at other schools, frequently have a surprisingly complete familiarity with the terms for English grammatical structures, though they may have trouble consistently controlling these alien forms as they write. Native English speakers, on the other hand, may have little formal knowledge of English grammar--though, being native speakers, they have an innate ability to produce grammatically correct English sentences. Because native English speakers have often been taught to confuse dialect differences or colloquial usages with “grammatical errors,” however, an important function of grammar/mechanical instruction must be to increase native English speakers’ awareness of their intuitive linguistic competence. For ideas about how to do this, check out Rei Noguchi’s classic book, Grammar and the Teaching of Writing: Limits and Possibilities.
2) An especially effective way of helping students control sentence-level error is to teach them what composition theorists call a “patterned approach to error recognition.” This kind of teaching is best done one-on-one, and should begin with a student’s graded essay. In your narrative comments on the essay, ask the student to set up an appointment with you; before the appointment, it’s the student’s responsibility to pick out two or three sentence-level problems that you’ve marked more than once. During your meeting, give the student a brightly-colored sheet of paper (this will help the student find the sheet later on, when she’s revising a new essay) and have her write out the problematic sentences as they appear in her paper. Below each sentence, have her explain in her own words–not using grammatical or mechanical terms that you supply–why the sentence doesn’t work as it’s written. Ask her also to come up with some context-based clues that might help her spot similar errors in a future draft (for example, she might notice that when she starts a sentence with “because,” she frequently ends up with a fragment). Finally, have her rewrite each sentence as she now believes it should be written. Realistically, the likelihood that one round of error detection will “cure” a particular pattern is small, but continued work usually can. Students who have learned the “patterned approach to error” can work more productively with tutors in the Learning Resource Center.
3) Many teachers direct their 101 students to the Purdue University Online Writing Lab (or “OWL”), a resource that is available to all students who have Web access. The Purdue OWL has a wide range of writing resources for college students; before sending students to this website, however, Roosevelt instructors should carefully read through it so that they understand the basic ways in which its approach to the writing process differs from the one emphasized in Roosevelt’s Composition Program. For instance, because Purdue’s undergraduate composition program is based on classical and contemporary rhetorical theory, the Purdue OWL includes almost no material related to the relationship between academic reading and writing—a primary focus of Roosevelt’s program. For students who “simply” need help with the mechanics of quotation, this difference may seem unimportant. However, insofar as the troubles that many students have working with other writers’ words actually stem from their inexperience as academic readers, the Purdue OWL’s decontextualized approach to quotation will probably not be very useful. As in every other aspect of composition teaching, instructors must look for a good “fit” between their teaching goals and the materials they present to students.
The final exam in 101
Unlike the final exam in ENG 100, which is a high-stakes test intended to assess readiness to move out of Basic Writing Practice, the final in 101 simply gives students one more chance to practice the skills they’ve worked on during the term. Individual instructors design and evaluate their own finals; some choose to require an in-class, timed response to a reading that students have completed outside of class time, while others give a take-home final due during the class’s exam period. Likewise, instructors may choose to make the final a “pass/fail” activity, or they can give the test a letter grade and calculate it as part of the students’ overall course grade. Finally, some instructors opt to include some “objective” items on their final exams (questions about mechanics, grammar, or critical reading, for instance). Be aware, though, that the exam should assess the students’ level of writing ability, not their ability to answer decontextualized “objective” questions about writing.
Official grading rubric for ENG 101
In order to avoid end-of-term misunderstandings, all ENG 101 syllabi should clearly state that the lowest passing course grade for 101 is “C.” Because a “D” in 101 does not help the student fulfill the University Writing Requirement, instructors should generally avoid giving it on paper assignments, as it can give the student the inaccurate idea that his/her writing is weak but passable. On the first two papers for the course, instructors might choose to give a grade of “NP” (not passing) as well as specific content- and mechanically-oriented suggestions for revision. After mid-semester, non-passing papers should receive a grade of “F”; in most cases, end-of-semester non-passing essays should not be eligible for further revision and regrading. While this suggestion may sound harsh, instructors need to be reasonably certain that students leaving 101 with a grade of “C” are likely to succeed in ENG 102 without heroic tutoring measures. Allowing last-minute rewrites and “regrades” makes it much harder for instructors to determine whether struggling students are really prepared to work more independently in ENG 102.
Though ENG 101 students do receive letter grades at the end of the course, some instructors prefer not to assign letter grades to individual assignments, offering instead a rubric (usually in chart form) listing areas for improvement in addition to the substantive narrative comments that instructors should offer on all essay assignments. Instructors who take this approach sometimes argue that letter grades distract many student from the more holistic kinds of development that they need to work on; most of these instructors require students to compile a portfolio of selected essay revisions for end-of-term grading. While many instructors have successfully taken this approach over the years, they should also keep in mind that grade-conscious students can become acutely anxious when they feel (accurately or not) that they lack a sense of how they’re doing in the course. In these situations, students are typically able to relax and do better work if their teachers assign unofficial “ballpark” grades to their essays.
Understanding ENG 101 grading criteria:
Before launching into a grade-by-grade breakdown for ENG 101 papers, some definitions of terms may be useful; many of the terms used in this guide are borrowed from or influenced by terms developed in the writing program at Rutgers University (for more RUWP resources, check out their exhaustive website: http://wp.rutgers.edu).
ENG 101 teachers (and their students) often talk about a “thesis statement,” “argument,” or “position”–terms that, while not equivalent, all point to the goal of a writer’s text, usually articulated in the first or second paragraph of an academic essay. In practice, even if they include a “thesis statement,” the most successful ENG 101 papers do not derive most of their focus from that one sentence; instead, strong papers accrue meaning as the writer uses examples and textual interpretation to test the implications of the opening idea. Likewise, most effective 101 papers may have moments of clear argumentation, but they tend to be more exploratory than contentious. A term that is somewhat broader than “thesis statement” and less combative than “argument” or “position” is project, defined by composition theorist Kurt Spellmeyer as what the student “wants to achieve in the paper. A student creates a project by contributing to the conversation raised by the texts read for class....One of the signs that a paper has a project is the creation of new or independent ideas that are affiliated with the assignment question, but generated from the writer’s unique attempt to answer that question.” When a paper’s controlling idea appears for the first time after the second paragraph–or even at the end of the paper, as sometimes happens with novice college writers–the project can be described as “emerging.” A paper with an emerging project may be passing at the beginning of the semester, but by the end of the semester, revised essays should articulate a project near the beginning of the paper.
Kurt Spellmeyer also uses the notion of an action horizon, the equivalent, perhaps, of a paper’s policy recommendation (something that, depending on the assignment, many 101 papers will not need to include). As Spellmeyer writes, “Action horizons imagine possibilities and solutions to the problems and issues of the text....effective action horizons recognize the complexity of real world problems and work through the texts to imagine new possibilities.”
Students in ENG 101 need to know how to work with text. This deceptively simple phrase encompasses a number of skills, most of which beginning 101 students will not have mastered.
Working with text includes the skills of summarizing, paraphrasing, and quoting textual passages that are appropriate to the projects they articulate in their papers. The texts they read for class provide students with examples that support students’ own interpretations, concepts to work with or extend, or connections to ideas and examples from other texts or from their own experiences (a skill which teachers in the Rutgers Writing Program call “thinking connectively”).
Effective papers in ENG 101 develop organizing strategies that are not arbitrary (as in the five paragraph essay, a genre that is not especially useful for college students to practice) but relate in clear ways to their writers’ projects and are clearly signposted within and between paragraphs. Within a paragraph, organization may refer to the relationship between individual claims, examples, or ideas, on the one hand, and a central claim that provides the rationale for the paragraph (sometimes this central claim is called a “topic sentence”). Between paragraphs, transitional sentences guide readers from one part of the student’s project to another; some transitional sentences are there to link or extend ideas from one paragraph to the one that follows, while other forms of signposting sum up where the writer has been and where she’s about to take her reader. Rather than (or, perhaps, in addition to) teaching decontextualized transitional words (often listed in writing guides like the Simon and Schuster Handbook), instructors should draw students’ attention to transitions/signposting as they are used in class readings by professional and academic writers. Instructors should also point out especially effective signposting in students’ own papers.
A central goal of ENG 101 is to help students develop effective presentation skills in their writing; they need to use Standard Edited English in their papers, learn to edit for clarity, and use appropriate punctuation. By the end of the term, students should also be learning to cite their sources accurately, using MLA or APA style, though documenting sources is less important than working actively with textual sources.
The central categories articulated by the Rutgers writing program–project, working with text, organization, and presentation–provide useful touchpoints for a basic ENG 101 grading rubric here at Roosevelt (though our grading criteria reflect significant differences between our students’ typical level of preparation and those of most Rutgers 101 students). Determining how a given paper compares to these grading criteria takes a good deal of practice, even for instructors who have been reading student writing for many years; the more papers one evaluates with these criteria in mind, the easier the process gets. For students, the benefits of having a consistent grading rubric across sections of ENG 101 cannot be underestimated. When students generally trust that a “B” paper in one section of ENG 101 is a “B” paper in another, instructors have fewer grade-related disputes with their students; likewise, when faculty across the university come to see that the Composition Program articulates and upholds a coherent set of standards, we can come to expect greater respect and cooperation for our mission-central courses.
Reasons why a 101 paper might not pass:
Project:
*The paper may lack a project, either stated or emerging. Such a paper may work with textual evidence, but the relationship between the readings and the goals of the paper is unclear.
*A paper may have a stated project, but the body of the paper may be so reliant on textual summary that the student’s perspective is absent.
Working with text:
*The paper may be “about” the assignment question or readings in a general way, but it does not make its points by working actively with appropriate textual passages.
*The student’s use of textual passages suggests that s/he does not understand either the project or the important details of the readings s/he is working with.
*The paper overuses summary of the reading(s) in ways that do not relate clearly to the assignment question.
Organization:
*Coherence within and between paragraphs is extremely weak.
Presentation:
*Sentence-level errors (including sentence boundaries and subject/verb agreement) seriously disrupt the paper’s readability.
*The paper has not been proofread for errors that the student knows how to control.
“C” PAPERS
Project:
*The student has a discernible goal in the paper, though the project may be very vague or may not emerge early enough in the essay to be effective.
*A paper can sometimes pass if it makes a strong, supported assertion at least once in the essay, even if the assertion is not clearly connected to the rest of the paper.
Working with text:
*The student can work with ideas from more than one reading in his/her paper, though the student has trouble using his/her own perspectives to link and/or comment on those ideas.
*The summary used in the essay suggests that the student understands the most important ideas in the readings.
Organization:
*The paper may attempt to establish relationships within or between paragraphs; paragraphs themselves usually have a controlling idea and include appropriate examples or support.
Presentation:
*The most disruptive sentence-level errors are under control and most sentences make sense. Each page may feature some errors, but the errors do not interfere excessively with meaning.
“C+” PAPERS
Project:
*These papers usually feature a thesis statement, though the new knowledge actually produced in the paper may not be clearly connected to the thesis statement (even if the student intends it to be).
*An “emerging project” in a C+ paper is articulated earlier and more clearly than in a C paper.
Working with texts:
*At several points in the paper, the writer may use ideas and/or passages from the readings in potentially productive ways, though s/he may not show how this textual work relates to his/her project.
*Papers in the C+ range work with more difficult ideas than C papers do, a sign of greater reading comprehension on the student’s part.
Organization:
*The paper probably has a weaker overall structure than a B paper might; signposting is present but inconsistent.
Presentation:
*No major patterns of error are present, though isolated mechanical errors may appear.
“B” PAPERS
(B papers may have a few of the features found in C+ papers, but the overall paper will be better developed and presented than a C+ paper).
Project:
*The structure and project of a B paper is more ambitious, complex, and sustained than in a C+ paper.
*The ideas in a B paper reflect the student’s own interpretations of the readings, but the student may have difficulty “unpacking” or elaborating on those ideas in ways that support his/her project.
*The opening paragraph explains the paper’s project more or less clearly, and the rest of the paper basically supports that project.
Working with Text:
*A B paper features a few interpretive risks–moments of response to the readings that reflect the student’s own priorities but still show awareness of the text’s meanings.
*The student chooses to use summary, paraphrase and direct quotation as they seem appropriate to his/her project, alternating different modes of textual work instead of using only one.
Organization:
*The parts of the paper relate to each other in clear and coherent ways.
*The project of the paper is announced early on and developed in a controlled and relatively confident style.
*Signposting is smoother than in a C paper.
Presentation:
*Very few mechanical errors.
“B+” PAPERS
(A B+ paper sometimes shares the basic features of a B paper, but is unusually ambitious and accomplished.)
Project:
*The project of a B+ paper is consistently more independent and complex than that of a B paper.
*B+ papers reflect some awareness of the significance of their projects, though moments of insight are not as consistent as in an A paper.
Working with text:
*Students easily work with all the different ways of bringing other texts into the paper.
*Textual analysis is more sophisticated and insightful.
*The student’s own agenda clearly controls his/her use of outside texts.
Organization:
*Each paragraph in a B+ paper contributes clearly to the project; flow between paragraphs is smooth.
Presentation:
*Very few presentation errors.
“A” PAPERS
(An “A” paper may have an occasional “B” or “C” moment, but the overall quality of the paper is undiminished.)
Project:
*An “A” paper features an unusually self-aware and confident project which is developed more methodically and persuasively than in a B+ paper
Working with text:
*The paper makes consistently insightful connections between ideas from the readings and easily demonstrates how these connections further the student writer’s overall project.
*The student’s use of the readings is often surprising but persuasive to the reader.
Organization
*The paper is carefully structured but the signposting is unobtrusive; it flows very smoothly.
Presentation:
*Few or no errors.
Sample Classroom Resources for ENG 101
The exercises and suggestions that follow are all class-tested; some were developed by instructors here at Roosevelt, while others are adapted from ones used in the Rutgers University Writing Program. Instructors who have exercises that effectively support Roosevelt’s 101 pedagogy are invited to submit them for inclusion in future editions of the 101 Instructor Resource Packet. Exercises that are not tied to specific readings are printed on a separate page so that Roosevelt instructors can pull them out and photocopy them for class use. (Instructors can also, obviously, adapt them to fit the specific kinds of work their students are doing.) Reading-specific teaching materials are presented as they’ve been used in the past; instructors can use them as starting points for developing their own materials.
First-Day Writing Sample
ENG 101: Introduction to Expository Writing
Carefully read this passage (adapted from an essay that explores ideas about feminism) and write as much as you can in response to the assignment that follows:
Despite its intellectual flabbiness, difference feminism (which holds that women are naturally more nurturing and, therefore, morally and ethically superior to men) is deeply appealing to many women. Why? For one thing, it seems to explain some important phenomena: that women--and this is a cross-cultural truth--commit very little criminal violence compared with men; that women fills the ranks of the so-called caring professions; that women are much less likely than men to abandon their children. Difference feminists want to give women credit for these good behaviors by raising them from the level of instinct or passivity to the level of moral choice and principled decision. Who can blame women for embracing theories that tell them the sacrifices they make on behalf of domesticity and children are legitimate, moral, even noble? By stressing the mentality of nurturance--the ethic of caring, maternal thinking--theorists like Carol Gilligan and Sara Ruddick challenge the ancient division of humanity into rational males and irrational females. They offer women a way to argue that their views have equal status with those of men and to resist the customary marginalization of their voices in public debate. Doubtless many women have felt emboldened by Gilliganian accounts of moral difference: Speaking in a different voice is, after all, a big step up from silence.
The vision of women as sharers and carers is tempting in another way, too. Despite much media blather about the popularity of the victim position, most people want to believe that they act out of free will and choice. The uncomfortable truth that women have all too little of either is a difficult hurdle for feminists. Acknowledging the systematic oppression of women seems to deprive them of existential freedom, to turn them into puppets, slaves, and Stepford wives. Deny it, and you can’t make change. By arguing that the traditional qualities, tasks and ways of life of women are as important valuable and serious as those of men (if not more so), Gilligan and others let women feel that nothing needs to change except the social valuation accorded to what they are already doing. It’s a rational for the status quo, which is why men like it, and a burst of grateful applause, which is why women like it. Men keep the power, but since power is bad, so much the worse for them.
--from “Marooned on Gilligan’s Island” by Katha Pollitt
In this excerpt, Pollitt discusses a definition of feminism that, in her opinion, hurts women more than it helps them. What do Pollitt’s ideas help you say about common explanations for women’s and men’s behavior in your own community (explanations that you’ve heard or even used yourself)? Write an informal essay exploring connections between Pollitt’s ideas and your own observations/experiences.
ENG 101: Introduction to Composition
First-Day Writing Sample
Carefully read this passage (adapted from a historical study of Americans’ reading habits) and write as much as you can in response to the assignment at the bottom of the page.
The special virtue of autobiographies in the history of reading is that they allow us to move our focus from the content of reading materials to the purposes of reading. Some reading activities were ubiquitous, had no dramatic consequences, and were widely shared across classes: the pleasure of a tale read aloud to children, the consolation of Bible reading, the ritual of reading the baseball scores in the daily newspaper, and so on. Other reading experiences played an important role as individuals’ careers moved toward certain values, goals, and social locations: it is these aspects of literacy--the adoption of an ideological perspective, a cultural heritage, and skills for a social role--that give literacy its weighty importance as social history and social policy. A typology that includes both the casual and the momentous uses of literacy will be helpful in surveying our autobiographies. We can group the purposes of reading under five headings: pleasure or escape; day-to-day information; economic or spiritual self-improvement; cultural promotion of dominant or minority cultures; and critical understanding and dissent.
A single text can serve several purposes for any specific reader, or different purposes for different readers, and most readers read for all five of these purposes at different times. The same text, obviously, can be variously informative, entertaining, culturally assimilationist, and self-improving. Nonetheless, the typology of purposes can serve as a tool for considering such factors as family, class, and gender in an individual’s reading career. For the more consequential, social purposes of reading, we can ask: What was at stake? What was to be gained from the reading? Who controlled the reading materials? Who was urging the reader to read them? For example, a child who grew up in a middle-class family and whose parents had many educational advantages faced different future prospects than a working-class child whose parents had relatively little education. When these two children went to school (usually not the same school) and encountered the school version of appropriate high culture--Shakespeare, Thomas Jefferson, and a proper business letter--their situations were different and so were the stakes. For the middle-class child from the highly educated family, the cultures of the school and the family were consonant; the school was an extension of the culture that surrounded the child at home. Furthermore, the payoff from high culture was clearer; one could assume that whether one liked Shakespeare or not, successful, cultured people needed to know about his work. For the working-class child from the less-educated family, or from a non-English tradition, the school’s version of high culture was more dissonant from the culture of the family, and the payoff was less clear. The cultural capital to be gained from the acquisition of knowledge about Shakespeare was less certain.
--from “Autobiographies and the History of Reading,” by Katherine Tinsley and Carl F. Kaestle
Write an informal essay in which you explore what Tinsley and Kaestle might notice about your personal history as a reader. As you write about your own reading habits and experiences, connect them as closely as you can with specific ideas from the passage.
Making Connections Between Texts
Since so much of the writing in 101 requires students to develop thoughtful responses to multiple readings, students need strategies that help them show how specific textual passages relate to each other. Here’s one that many students have used:
You’ve read and re-read the texts that you’ll be using in the assignment, and you have some quotations from each one that you believe are connected. On a fresh sheet of paper, draw a line down the middle of the page and write one quote at the top of each of your two columns, so that you can see the two quotes side-by-side. Highlight the phrases that seem connected, and below the two quotes, write out your own sentence explaining the connection you see. In your sentence, you might choose to use the two phrases (putting each one in quotation marks), or you might try to put each phrase into your own words. Do this for each set of quotes you want to connect in your paper. When you use one of these “connection sentences” in your paper, remember to cite the pages where each of your quotes originally appeared.
Turning class discussion into material for writing
Sometimes it can be difficult to participate in a lively discussion of texts or experiences while also taking notes on the discussion so that you can refer to it when you’re writing your paper. In order to solve this problem, it can be helpful to stop a discussion every once in a while so that you and your classmates have a chance to gather up the most useful ideas expressed or developed as people were talking. Write down everything that stands out in your mind from the discussion so far; if you find anything confusing as you’re writing, ask for clarification at the end of the short writing break. Then, before you and your classmates leave class, look back over your writing and highlight or mark any ideas that you think you’d like to use in your paper.
Alternately, during a class writing break, your instructor might ask you to write down five specific questions about the issues that have come up so far in the discussion. If you find this difficult, start by writing down questions that fit into the following patterns:
“What is the relationship between ________ and ________?”
“When _______ writes about __________, does she mean __________ or _________?”
At the end of class, take a couple of minutes to write out the best responses you can at this moment to these questions. These questions and responses will help you develop a focus for your current essay assignment.
A “Framing” Exercise
One of the most important skills a writer can develop is the ability to look at one idea through a “frame” provided by another idea. For some writers, this skill comes easily, while for others, it takes practice. Here’s a good way to start developing the ability to “frame” ideas:
Using the writers your class is currently working with, fill in the first blank in the sentence below with an idea or incident from the first writer; fill in the second blank with a useful concept from the second writer. Then keep writing until you’ve got about 200 words explaining the connection you have made.
Writer X’s experience of _______________ is a good example of Writer Y’s concept of ___________ because....
(You can also do the reverse: “Writer X’s experience of __________ is a poor example of Writer Y’s concept of ____________ because....”)
Once you’ve practiced this exercise a few times, it will become easier for you to create “frames” that help you explore relationship’s between any two writer’s ideas.
Examples of effective essay assignments
The following class-tested assignments were developed in sections of ENG 101 using Colombo et al.’s Rereading America (Bedford-St. Martin’s) or Brunk et al.’s Literacies: Reading, Writing, Interpretation (Norton). They work in part because they’re brief, and in part because they ask students a specific but still open-ended question.
1) Brian Ladd writes that by forbidding citizens to refer directly to “the Wall,” East German officials tried to “control the dangerous implications of figurative language” (339). Explore how Ladd’s discussion of this dangerous “signifier” helps you to understand attempts to control language in Susan Sontag’s essay “AIDS and Its Metaphors.”
Your essay should be at least 1000 words (about four pages). Please bring your original and two copies of your essay to class on Thursday, 9/14, for our first revision session. After you’ve had a chance to revise and rewrite, we’ll have a second revision session on Tuesday, 9/19. Your final draft will be due on Tuesday, 9/21.
2) Paying attention both to the ways they do and don’t fit, adapt, modify, and/or revise the “rules of manhood” that David Gilmore writes about in “Performative Excellence” so that they apply to the men in Alastair MacLeod’s story, “The Vastness of the Dark.” How does your analysis of masculinity help you to understand the major conflicts in the story?
3) Choose several concepts from Lynda Workman’s “The Experience of Policy” that discuss how different understandings of “policy” can guide people’s behavior or relationships. Use these terms to explain the actions of Señora Ines and Rosaura in Liliana Heker’s story “The Stolen Party.” How do you need to revise Workman’s concepts so that they provide more satisfying explanations for the behavior of these two characters?
Revision Task Sheets
Group “workshopping” sessions teach students more about effective revision when instructors give them concrete tasks to accomplish, and when essay writers can take their peers’ comments home with them. Having students turn these sheets in with their final drafts helps instructors see which students are giving the most helpful feedback (so that instructors can regroup students, if necessary, in order to match their strengths and needs) and also creates accountability on the part of students who might be inclined to chat or otherwise avoid the task at hand.
EVALUATION SHEET FOR GROUP DRAFTWORK
Please fill out a sheet for each paper you comment on; return the sheet to the paper’s writer.
Writer’s name___________________________
Evaluator’s name___________________________
1) Use an “S” to mark the sections of the essay where the writer works with Scholes’s idea of “surrender,” an “R” to mark places where s/he deals with “recovery,” and a “P” for the parts that explore “patriotism.” How clearly does his/her understanding of these concepts come through in the sections you have marked? (Keep in mind that a writer may deal with more than one of these ideas at a time.) Point out aspects of the writer’s work with “surrender,” “recovery,” and “patriotism” that need to be clarified or extended.
2) Comment on the writer’s analysis of a “beloved American icon.” Does it provide a specific and detailed enough foundation for the rest of his/her argument? Suggest some ideas that the writer might include in order to strengthen and expand this part of his/her analysis.
3) Comment on the organizational framework that the writer creates for her/his essay. How clear and inviting is the introduction? How could the links and transitions between paragraphs be improved? Does the conclusion do a good job of explaining the significance of the writer’s findings?
4) Suggest a lively and accurate title for the writer’s essay.
“Seed” exercises
As their name suggests, “seed” exercises help students learn how much mileage they can get out of relatively small chunks of the texts they’re working with. They can be used as the basis for longer, more difficult essay assignments; students who have already written 400 words (or even 200 words) about a particular idea will feel more confident about their ability to complete the assignment. And, if they’re really off-track, it will be easier for an instructor to figure out what they’re not understanding before they get too far into the process.
“Seed” #1
George Lipsitz, a professor of ethnic studies who is quoted in Lynell George's essay, says that L.A.'s young people "look for spaces that are what we call 'multicultural.' I don't think that they ever think to look at it in those ways. But there's a sense of interest and excitement and delight in difference that makes them look for more complexity" (431).
Find and write about some passages from George's essay that, in your opinion, help to explain what George Lipsitz is talking about in this passage. You should write about 400 words.
“Seed” #2: Creating New Ideas from Quotations
Working with the following two quotations from Jean Anyon’s and Ruth Sidel’s essays, write as much as you can about how they might relate to each other. You might want to write about each one separately for a while before you write about them together. Try, for example, to explain what the context for each quote is (that is, explain what the writer is discussing in the section of the essay that the quote is taken from), what you think the quote means, how you think it fits into the writer's overall argument. Then write for a while about what the quotes say when they are looked at together. In addition to showing what they mean when they are looked at together, you should also show how the importance of each one changes when they are examined side-by-side.
1) "One teacher [at the Executive Elite school] told a child, 'You are the only driver of your car--and only you can regulate your speed.' A new teacher complained to the observer that she had thought 'these children' would have more control" (Anyon 59).
2) "Angela Dawson, a sixteen-year-old high school junior from southern California, sums up the views of the New American Dreamers: 'It's your life. You have to live it yourself...If you work hard enough, you will get there. You must be in control of your life, and then somehow it will all work out'" (Sidel 459).