English 101
Course Description
Preface about English 101:
The first year of college can often challenge students in both exciting and frustrating ways. The habits of reading, writing, listening, and speaking that helped you succeed in high school may no longer provide the strategies for your continued achievement in the university. Students often feel surprised and disappointed that the quantity and quality of work that they did in high school to earn top-grades doesn’t gain them the same high marks here. English 101 will introduce you to the expectations of college-level literacy, offer you processes and strategies to navigate them, and provide opportunities to rehearse these new communicative capabilities and genres of writing. To succeed in this English 101, you will need to remain open and flexible to unfamiliar ways of doing things, to reconsider and revise the work that you produce, and to accept criticism as a means of improving your advanced literacy abilities.
About This Specific English 101:
In 19th-century Paris, the flaneurs–normally a privileged (white) gentleman– tried inconspicuously to stroll the streets of that city to chronicle what happened there and then leave his impression about it through text or images. In 21st-century New York City, many different types of people report their unique perspectives of the city. They make comments about city living by observing what happens here and then finding a way to leave their mark about it. New reporters, graffiti taggers, food critiques, amateur photographers, Facebookers, and artists (among many others) identify a specific characteristic about this inspiring metropolis and then study it to present its particularities to an audience who may have completely overlooked something previously considered insignificant. Contemporary flaneurs enlighten us about their idiosyncratic vision (and when I say vision I mean their sight, taste, smell, hearing, and feeling) of the urban landscape.
As intellectual citizens of New York City and participants in this semester’s course, you will chronicle your perspective of the city. New York City will act as your text. While you can take the same routes and frequent the same locales that you normally do, this course will ask you to see it with a different set of sensibilities. You’ll walk through your neighborhoods, ride the subway, eat at local food joints, or any of the daily things that you do; however, while you continue your quotidian life, you will pay attention to your urban habits and the patterns of the city-dwellers around you. You will observe your world with the heightened awareness of invested intellectuals who want to know more about their environments and then generously share it with others. Of course, we will read other people’s ideas about NYC to gain inspiration and guidance but, most importantly, you will identify a focused issue about the city, investigate it, and find a way to document it. Sometimes the simplest thing provides the richest topic for exploration, but to find it you must mindfully discern the world around you. Once you’ve found a distinct urban topic, you will research what impressions or ideas other people may have had about your subject of study. You will consider how your perspective aligns (or misaligns) with their thinking. Then, with your collected data and a series of interrelated assignments, you will prepare a composition (photo essay, podcast, Prezi, traditional essay, performance) that best portrays your vision of New York City.
Course Objectives–General & Specific
General Writing Program Learning Objectives
Invention and Inquiry: Students learn to explore and develop their ideas and the ideas of others in a meaningful and complex way.
Awareness and Reflection: Students learn to metacognitively analyze their writing, to plan their writing tasks, to monitor their progress, and to adapt their writing methods as needed.
Writing Process: Students learn methods of composing, drafting, revising, editing and proofreading.
Sentence Fluency: Students learn to write clear, complete and correct sentences and use a variety of independent and dependent clause forms.
Conventions: Students learn to control language, grammatical structures, and punctuation necessary for academic writing.
Rhetoric and Style: Students learn rhetorical and stylistic choices that are appropriate and advantageous to a variety of genres, audiences and contexts.
Claims and Evidence Students learn to develop logical and substantial claims, provide valid and coherent evidence for their claims and show why and how their evidence supports their claims.
Research: Students learn to conduct research (primary and secondary), evaluate research sources, integrate research to support their ideas, and cite sources appropriately.
Very Specific Learning Objectives:
Read and listen critically and analytically, including identifying an argument’s major assumptions and assertions and evaluating its supporting evidence.
- Classroom discussions and exercises help student to explore their ideas and think more critically.
- Students practice rhetorical exercises which help them clarify their ideas in essays.
- Students develop abilities of critical thinking for both reading and writing. They explore the difference between the concepts of summary, analysis, and inference.
- Students explore the processes of academic literacy through a variety of in-class and out-of class writing exercises and assignments.
Write clearly and coherently in varied, academic formats (such as formal essays, research papers, and reports) using standard English and appropriate technology to critique and improve one’s own and others’ texts. Demonstrate research skills using appropriate technology, including gathering, evaluating, and synthesizing primary and secondary sources.
- Students learn forms and conventions of academic writing.
- Students write and revise a sequence of writing assignments (letter or narrative, paper proposal, outline, memorandum, which each contribute to the invention, organization, and research of an inquiry-based paper.
- Students understand the relationships between these different types of writing: how each academic genre informs and applies to the final research paper, what the interrelationships between the various forms are, and how each form acts as a building block to re-envision and rewrite the subsequent drafts.
Support a thesis with well-reasoned arguments, and communicate persuasively across a variety of contexts, purposes, audiences, and media.
- Students learn to differentiate between speculation, opinion, analysis, and inference.
- Students practice in-class peer review to grow increasingly aware of audience, readers’ expectation, and the qualities necessary to convey ideas clearly.
- Students gain the language and self-awareness about their literate abilities that allow them to discuss their strengths and challenges of expression
- Students learn techniques for inventing, arranging, researching, editing, and proofreading texts.
- Students learn the proper formatting and presentation of the computer-generated paper.
- Students prepare a final portfolio that includes all of their writing assignments from the semester.
Formulate original ideas and relate them to the ideas of others by employing the conventions of ethical attribution and citation.
- Students learn methods of critiquing their peers’ as well as their own writing.
- Students learn to use information technology to complete the research of their writing assignments.
- Students learn to discriminate among the types of information they find, deciding which authors are viable experts, which information is pertinent to their subject, and the ways this information must be prepared to incorporate into their writing.
- Students learn to integrate secondary sources into their essays.
- Students master MLA or APA Style Documentation.
Pre/Co-Requisites: ACT Certification
Required Text: I will provide readings for this course on the John Jay e-reserve. You will also access online sites such as Purdue OWL (Online Writing Lab) for guidance with writing strategies and grammar.
Course Assignments
Required Assignments with Explanations:
Assignment 1 A piece of creative non-fiction that describes a meaningful, well-detailed experience that you have had in New York City. You will use this descriptive piece to help you eventually identify a researchable question that you want to investigate. Within every experience and accompanying story, you can always find questions about which to investigate.
The Commuter Assignment Stages
Step 1: Commuting Photos & Captions
Take five digital photos of your commute back and forth between home and school (or work). Don’t just take random images. Search for unusual perspectives, pieces of artwork, or memorable landmarks that make your commuting route unique and meaningful. How do these pics represent your daily NYC commute? What could they teach others about your commute, your neighborhood, or New York City? For each photo, write a five to six sentence paragraph (or more if you want) that tells its story or gives the reason for why you chose this photographic viewpoint.
Step 2: Commuter Photo Essay
Using your captions as a point of departure, compose a STORY that narrates a “personal journey” through which you have gone. It can be a real, physical journey and/or a personal, internal “journey” that you’ve completed. By integrating photos strategically throughout your essay, use either your commuting pics to illustrate your photo essay or, alternatively, take other photos that better suit your story.
The Graffiti Group Presentation Assignment Stages
Step 1: READINGS FOR GRAFFITI: (If you can’t access these readings from these links, you will find them on ereserve. (Password: McBeth).)
Wilson, James Q. and Kelling G. L. Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety. file:///Users/markmcbeth/Desktop/Broken%20Windows%20-%2082.03.webarchive
Kramer, Ronald. (2010) Moral panics and urban growth machines: Official reactions to graffiti in New York City, 1990 – 2008. Qualitative Sociology 33: 297-311 http://web.ebscohost.com.ez.lib.jjay.cuny.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=dee9bfef-cbe0-4e18-964d d98f0ea66380%40sessionmgr112&vid=2&hid=106
Kramer, Ronald. (2010) Painting with Permission: Legal graffiti in New York City. Ethnography 11 (2):235-253. http://apps.webofknowledge.com.ez.lib.jjay.cuny.edu/InboundService.do?SID=3AGp2iLpM6ji2AFhNGb&product=WOS&UT=WOS%3A000279064000002&SrcApp=360&DestFail=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.webofknowledge.com&Init=Yes&action=retrieve&Func=Frame&customersID=SerialsSolutions&SrcAuth=SerialsSolutions&IsProductCode=Yes&mode=FullRecord
Dickinson, Maggie. (2008) The making of space, race and place: New York City’s war on graffiti, 1970-the present. Critique of Anthropology 28 (1): 27-45.
Step 2: GRAFFITI GROUP DIRECTIONS For the group projects, students will work collaboratively on a project that concerns the issue of street art. The projects require a group project proposal, a completed project (with class presentation), and a personal work journal that records the processes of the group from each individual student’s perspective.
The group proposal will be a 1-2 page explanation of the project. It must include the purpose of the project, how the project will be approached, who the target audience will be, and what materials (letters/memos, press releases, flyers/brochures, essay, etc.) will be produced for the project. Each person in the group receives the same grade for this part of the project. Each person in the group will also receive the same grade for the project and presentation. The proposal plus the presentation are together worth one-half of the project grade. Groups will give presentations (10-ish minutes).
Individual group members will gain the remaining half of the project grade by keeping a journal which chronicles the dynamics of the group. In the journal, you will chronicle what contributions you made to the group, how well the group members communicate and collaborate (or don’t), and the amount of time that you devote to your group tasks. Since this is half of the project grade, the journal should be extensive, richly detailed, and thoughtfully reflective.
Below you will find the group projects. I will assign each group one of these assignment or the group can devise their own project for which they will write a proposal and pitch to me to seek approval. We do these group research projects collectively so that everyone can learn the strategies and expectations of college-level work. In about three weeks, each individual student in this class will then choose their own research project and repeat the process to complete their independent intellectual endeavor.
Street Art Dictionary
The Street Art community has devised their own language that categorizes different types of street art (i.e., bubble style, wheat paste), names diverse types of artists (i.e., taggers, writers), and designates certain acts of the community (i.e., bombing). Through reading, documentaries, and possibly interviews with street artists, this group will do research to discover the specialized language of the street art community and develop a lexicon of its language. Accompanying this lexicon, the group will compose an introduction that explains their techniques and strategies of compiling and defining this street-wise language. The dictionary should include words, definitions, specific usages, and images that exemplify certain words.
Street Art: An International Perspective
In this course, we have focused out attentions on the street art of New York City. Graffiti art originated in the United States but the practice has spread way beyond the borders of the fifty states. This group will research the phenomenon of street art in other parts of the world. Through secondary sources (books, articles), documentaries and, perhaps, personal contacts in other countries this group will investigates how street art has manifested itself around the world.
Saving 5 Pointz: A Grassroots Graffiti Effort
When we visited 5 Pointz, Meres One explained how the aerosol arts center may face eviction (Can you be evicted from an outside space?) and New York City may lose its primary legal locale for street art. This group will prepare a research essay that investigates the history of the center, the context of its existence, the gentrification of Long Island City, and the efforts to preserve this artistic landmark. Using this information, the group will prepare flyers, brochures, or online informational platforms to inform people about the value of the center and the threat to its survival.
Individual Proposal Assignment Stages
A proposal that adopts some investigative question from your piece of creative non-fiction. This proposal will present a topic, examine the purpose of this investigation, consider the methods of exploring the subject, and designate resources that will be useful for their exploration. Your first draft of this proposal may be initially vague but after you do the research for subsequent assignments, focus your questions based on the research you do, and shape your essay, you will revise your proposal to reflect the development of your inquiry.
Step 1: Within your narrative, identify some investigative questions that could become the topic of your research paper.
Step 2: Identify a specific “object of study” that you will analyze and critique, thus providing the ideas that inform your overall topic.
Step 3: In a proposal, articulate a detailed plan for exploring your chosen inquiry. The proposal should name your topic and object of study, how your object of study will help you answer questions about your topic, a methodology (a plan for doing your study), and a rationale of why this topic demands the attention of your imagined audience.
Annotated Bibliography Assignment Stages
An annotated bibliography which asks you to find and report about at least three secondary sources which inform your primary investigation. As a classroom, we will visit the library to attend workshops on information technology as well as how to use resources of the library. In writing the précis for the annotated bibliography, you will learn to summarize, paraphrase, and use direct quotes. These secondary sources will also help you understand the discourse that surrounds your inquiry question.
Step 1: After choosing your investigative question, decide what secondary sources (outside information from other researchers/scholars) that you will need to inform yourself and your audience about your investigative topic. Don’t assume that you know everything about your topic, and don’t assume that the experts you choice have all the answers.
Step 2: Visit library to learn techniques for searching for secondary sources both in hard copy and online.
Step 3: Read the secondary sources that you find prepare précis in your annotated bibliography.
Step 4: Learn MLA/APA documentation styles and implement the appropriate style in your research documents.
First Draft Assignment Stages
A first draft of your inquiry-based project allows you to make an initial exploration of your proposed idea. Your first draft permits you to display what you know about your subject (through personal experience or external resources), to formulate some preliminary ideas, and to experiment with how you will express what you know as well as what you need to learn about your topic.
Step 1: Write 8 pages (not 7 or 7 ½) of a draft that helps you explore your ideas and lets you see where you can incorporate expert information or where you need more data.
Step 2: With the help of Mark and your peers, identify the richest, most generative ideas of this first draft.
Step 3: Revise your draft, eliminating ideas that don’t fit, highlighting your most productive thoughts, and adding information that improves your initial thinking.
Outline Assignment Stages
A formal outline gives your the opportunity to lay out possible organizations for your essay. You should experiment with how you arrange and prioritize your ideas and resources in the outline. This typically formalistic piece of academic writing will help you develop the most logical and accessible rhetorical strategy for your audience. You will revise this outline as your essay progresses so that it reflects the updated strategies and materials of your developing composition.
Step 1: Prepare a formal outline that directly mimics that outline of your draft.
Step 2: Cut apart your outline (physically) and re-puzzle the outline into a more logical, audience-friendly version. Add outline sections where you notice gaps in your thinking.
Step 3. Re-organize your actual draft so that it directly parallels your new, more logical outline.
Step 4: You may need to return to this assignment as you gain more information about your topic and understand it better. Becoming more knowledgeable will help you to organize your paper more logically and legibly for your readers.
Expert One-Act Play Script Assignment Stages
The scripted interview is a piece of writing that challenges students to consider the relationships between the ideas of the outside authors they have read as well as their own contributions to their topics. Students prepare a script in which they are a participating interviewer (think Charlie Rose) who questions the ideas and perspectives of two authors they have read for their annotated bibliography. The authors they interview exchange views upon the topic while the student interviewer observes, analyzes, and responds to their interrelated ideas. This experimental (and completely hypothetical) piece of writing challenges students to think about how the established writers they have researched would interact: if placed face to face and prompted with questions would these experts compare and contrast their ideas through mutual agreement, critical analysis, persuasion, and/or argument.
Step 1: Choose two (or maybe) three experts who have appeared in your annotated bibliography and whom you’ve used in your research draft.
Step 2: Make a list of questions that you would ask these experts based on the text that you have read by them. Also, consider questions that would evoke discussion between your interviewees. How can your questions incite deeper discussions, disagreements, arguments, and negotiations between your experts?
Step 3: Compose a script of a one-act play where you interview these experts, asking them questions that will start their interactions. How would you imagine that these real-life characters would respond to each other? You may use direct quotes from their texts for these interactions, but you should also take some educated liberties on what they may say and how you would compose their ideas into this script. This one-act play should help you “synthesize” the ideas of your experts as well as with your own inquiries.
Second Draft Assignment Stages
After a recursive process of completing the above forms, you will prepare a second draft and eventually third draft of your inquiry-based paper. After exploring your topic in a variety of writing forms and rhetorical methods, you will have a more informed, analytical, and critical approach to the topic you have chosen to investigate.
Step 1: You have written a narrative that helped you consider inquiries that relate to this course and your personal, urban experiences (your creative, non-fiction narrative). You have identified an investigative question and devised a plan of significant analysis and study (your proposal). You have invented ideas and then organized them into a more logical form (first draft & outline). You have considered how your and your chosen experts’ ideas intersect and inform your overall topic. Now you must begin the process of re-crafting so that each section, paragraph, and sentence conveys your ideas in the best way that they can.
Step 2: Review your peers’ and your own work to consider the best use of organization strategies for your particular essays. Do you have a representative title? Do you have an introduction that explicitly articulates your topic and object of study? Do you have a paragraph that explains your study’s methodology? Do you have a review of the literature? Do you have analysis and discussion about your actual object of study? Do you have conclusionary remarks about what this study has taught you and your audience? Have you marked these different sections with sub-titles or does your paper flow better without sub-headings?
Step 3: Does each paragraph have a claim (a topic sentence), some evidence (primary or secondary sources), and a warrant (an interpretive, logical explanation of the interrelationship between your claim and evidence)?
Step 4: Have you composed each paragraph and each sentence in the best way that you can and with the criteria that we’ve established in this course.
Portfolio Cover Letter Assignment Stages
At the end of the semester, you will compose a cover letter to your English 201 instructor explaining the process that you have gone through to create the contents of your inquiry-based portfolio. You will describe the strengths you have gained while producing the various pieces of writing in this collection as well as the challenges that you still face as a writer. Throughout the semester, you should keep a blog that records the problems, breakthroughs, and achievements that you experience; this blog will then contain the data and information that you will need to complete this final cover letter.
course policies & Procedures
Accessing E-Reserve Texts
You will also find handouts and readings on electronic reserve. To access these documents, go to www.jjay.cuny.edu and click on “Library” . . . on the left hand side of the library’s website click on E-reserve … click on “Reserve Readings” . . . on the scroll down Search Field click “Instructors” . . . in blank field type “McBeth” … click on English 101 …you will be asked for a password . . . type McBeth.
Grading, Absence, Lateness, and Deadline Policies
Grading Policy
During this course, your words will earn your grade for you – not only by the quantity that you produce but, also, by the quality of their expression. Each assignment will have a certain value which you will accumulate in your McCredit account. For example, for the piece of creative non-fiction you can possibly accumulate a total of 100 credit points. The first time you submit a draft of this piece you may receive only 25 points because you didn’t fulfill the expectations of the assignment. Don’t despair. You may then revise it and have credit added to the subsequent draft. After multiple drafts your narrative may go from a value of 25 points to 95 points (or 100), but this depends upon your willingness to revise, your ability to respond to critique about your writing, and your motivation to resubmit your work. For each assignment, you have three (3) chances to resubmit a draft. Whatever ever points you receive on your third draft will represent the total number of points that you can gain on that assignment . . . so don’t waste your revisions. When you redraft, you should always remain attentive to the writing criteria and make sure that you fulfill them in the best way that you can.
Assignment Points & Grading Scale:
Collecting Images with Captions 100 pts.
Composing a Piece of Creative Non-Fiction 100 pts.
Identifying an Investigative Question 100 pts.
Composing Proposal 100 pts.
Annotating Sources into a Reflective Bibliography 500 pts.
Inventing a First Draft (Eight Full Pages) 0 pts. or 100 pts.
Outlining the First Draft 100 pts.
Reframing Your Essay on the New Logical Outline 100 pts.
Composing a Scripted Interview 200 pts.
Redrafting/Recrafting of Final Research Project 400 pts.
Portfolio Cover Letter 200 pts.
Total 2000 pts.
You can accumulate 2000 total points by composing, redrafting and re-crafting your assignments. Throughout the semester, you and I will keep an account of your point credit, and, at the end of the term, you will exchange your accrued points for the grade you earn. The point grade scale follows:
A+ 2000 +
A 1900-1999
A- 1800-1899
B+ 1750-1799
B 1700-1749
B- 1650-1699
C+ 1600-1649
C 1550-1599
C- 1500-1549
D+ 1400-1499
D 1300-1399
D- 1200-1299
F 1199 or less points
Deadline Policy
You may also lose points from your account. In the real world where people have jobs, they must adhere to strict deadlines. If an employer requests something done by a specified time and date, your reputation and position depend upon your ability to produce the assigned task by the designated time. You need to start practicing this personal responsibility now. In this course, for every day you submit your assignments late, you lose ten (10) points. Once you lose these “missed-deadline” points, you may never recover them.
Absence & Lateness Policy
You may also lose points by lateness to class or absence from class. For every ten (10) minutes that you arrive to class late (class begins at 10:50AM), you lose five (5) points. You may not regain these “tardiness losses.” We have too little time to learn and no time to lose during this fifteen-week session; every minute counts.
For every absence, you lose 50 (fifty ) points. We only meet for fifteen (15) weeks and we will complete a lot of reading, exercises, and work during these class sessions. If you want to regain these points, you must compose a memorandum to me. The absence memo must state the reason for your absence, provide evidence for it, and what you’ve done to inform yourself about what you’ve missed. It must also fulfill all of the writing criteria of the course (clearly written, convincingly persuasive, and professionally presented (proofread and typed)). Depending upon your rationale, your evidence, your efforts to recover missed work, and the quality of your memo’s writing, you could regain a partial or the complete amount of your absentee losses. You must submit absence memos with evidence 48 hours after you have missed class.
Submitting Drafts Via Email
We will hold some of the sessions of this course in a computer lab, where we will do much of the writing in class and you will complete the revisions outside of class. You will also possibly share your drafts with peers during class via the internet, so always have an electronic copy available somewhere where you can access it on the internet.
I also do not collect hard copies of papers for commentary and critique. You will submit your assignment drafts to me as .doc or .docx attachments to JJMark.McBeth@yahoo.com. After received, I read them and place tracked comments throughout the text, acknowledging your strengths as well as suggesting improvements.
Tagging your Submissions
Please remember that when you email me drafts of your assignments, you MUST TAG both the subject line of your email and the name of your attachment. When you save the attachment, name it with the following title: your first initial, your last name, an abbreviated name of the assignment, and the number of the draft. So for example if John Suarez sent me the first draft of his annotated bibliography, he would title his attachment: jsuarezannbib1. You should also place this tag in the subject line of the email that you send me. The second draft of the complaint letter that John Suarez would send me would be renamed: jsuarezannbib2 and so forth for each subsequent draft.
I require this tagging of emailed and attached assignments because I sometimes receive over 50 drafts a day and, without the prescribed tagging, I can’t keep track of your work. Also, businesses often require their employees to use such tags for emailed tasks as well. So you should practice following such required email regulations. If you send me work without the appropriate tag, I’ll send it back to you without reading and wait for you to do it properly and then resend. You cannot gain points for your assignments unless you tag your attachments and subject lines exactly as I have requested.
Below you will find the tagging abbreviations for all of the required assignments:
Photos & Captions (phocap); Creative Non-Fiction (crenon); Proposal (prop); Interview (inter); Annotated Bibliography (annbib); Research Paper (respap); Outline (out); Reflection Letter (reflet)
Plagiarism/Cheating Policy
You will find the John Jay Policy on Academic Integrity at: http://www.jjay.cuny.edu/academics/762.php
I stand strictly by my no-tolerance plagiarism and cheating policy: Don’t!
