Academic Skills/Winter Semester 2020-2022: MONDAY GROUP
BA Anglophone Studies
Mondays 14-16
R12 RO4 B11
All students: My personal preference, if we meet in person, is for all of us to be (like me) fully vaccinated. The choice is yours, but my chronic condition puts me in life-threatening danger if I am exposed to the Coronavirus. Thank you for considering this request.
This course will help students find their place in the world of academic and critical writing—and enjoy that world. You will learn to participate in ongoing debates, forming and developing your own opinions in written responses. We will:
- Think of writing as entering a conversation, and enter the conversation to agree, disagree, or redefine the problem. For example, “Some Germans see Merkel’s refugee policy as _________. I think________.”
- Read and respond to writing prompts in our textbook: They Say / I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing (2018) By Birkenstein and Graff
- Learn to cite sources using the MLA (Modern Language Association) Style sheet. The following link is useful: https://owl.purdue.edu/
Weekly essays and in-class writings will be edited by the instructor and by your classmates. Please come to the first class with a list of at least three topics that strongly interest you. You are invited to consult the “they say, I say” blog: http://www.theysayiblog.com/
Required Text: They Say/I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing (2018) by Birkenstein and Graff
Requirements: Come to every class and hand in every essay on time. Essays will be edited and discussed in each class. Each week, you will upload to our Moodle, no later than Saturday at 8:00 p.m., one 2-3 page double-spaced typed (12-point type) and titled essay. Remember to proofread your work, and to read it out loud before turning it in. An essay is an expression of your opinion, your opinion is formed using your observations, and your completed essay justifies those opinions to a reader.
Useful links:
http://tetw.org/post/51496965520/10-classic-essays
https://www.scribd.com/doc/202094055/Karen-Elizabeth-Gordon-The-Deluxe-Transitive-Vampire
http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/composition/composition.htm
http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-girl
https://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/EngPaper/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thesis_statement
https://www.shmoop.com/essay-lab/
https://nybookeditors.com/2016/04/use-these-18-apps-to-improve-your-writing/
Recommended (NOT required):
Gordon, Karen Elizabeth. The New Well-Tempered Sentence: A Punctuation Handbook for the Innocent, the Eager and the Doomed.
Gordon, Karen Elizabeth. The Deluxe Transitive Vampire: The Ultimate Handbook fo Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed
Heinrichs, Jay. Thank You for Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion.
Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
Strunk&White, The Elements of Style, 4th edition
Trenga, Bonnie. The Curious Case of the Misplaced Modifier: How to Solve the Mysteries of Weak Writing.
Your writing should always concern topics that interest you. I may assign a particular theme, but you must find a way to make it interesting to yourself. As a general rule, any subject that provokes a strong feeling—one that makes you feel either, “I love that,” or “I hate that,” or “I don’t want to think about that!” provides good material. Controversy is nearly always good in essay writing: it is also good mental training to pick your way through minefields of public opinion in, say, an election year. Why Scholz and not Baerbock? Why Baerbock and not Laschet? Why . . .? State where you stand and why. Imagine the point of view of a reader unsympathetic to your position. Convince that person you’re right.
Topics that traditionally provoke conflicting opinions include, but are not limited to, the following: Politics, Religion, Family, Sexuality, Money, Food. If you can’t think what to write about, gravitate to these topics. Along the way, issues of grammar and mechanics—“the rules”—will be important, but remember that the rules are generally there to make things easier for the reader. Some rules are just conventions, and have changed within the last fifty years, and will probably change within your lifetimes.
- Lehrende(r): Melissa Knox-Raab
