Class Notes
ENGL 131
Table of Contents
Week 1 Monday
What is English 131?
- English Composition (C) course: emphasizes organization and expression of ideas.
- Refine skills by rewriting papers after receiving feedback.
- Lays groundwriting for disciplinary writing courses.
Instructor Role
- Some of traditional instructional role: lecturing, delivering instruction, etc.
- Mostly guidance
- Concepts and writing theory
- Assignments to practice writing, provide feedback
- Evaluate student work based on labor and course concept outcomes.
- Email:
jenba@uw.edu - Office hours: Zoom, Mondays and Wednesday 2:30 to 3:30
Composition: Exposition
- Study and practice of good writing: topics derived from a variety of personal, academic, and public subjects.
- Composition - acadmeic discipline concerned witht he processes writers use to compose and share texts
- Exposition - writing or speech intneded to convey information or to explain. Communicating with the intention to make somehting clear or to be understood. Lectures given by professors are consdiered to be expository/an exposition.
- Who you are and where you are affect how you communicate, understand, and are understood.
- Writing is situational - you can learn a lot by looking at what it is trying to accomplish and who it is trying to communicate with. Audience and Purpose. Close reading allows us to do this.
What Will We Do in the Class?
- Reading; 2 texts per week. 1-2 hours of reading.
- Small Group Work; 1 per week. 50 minutes.
- Large Group Work; 1 per week. 50 minutes.
- Writing; 1 formal assignment every 2 weeks and smaller daily activities
- Conference; 2 (10-15 minutes) required per quarter.
We will meet at least once on Zoom every week; however in the future there will be more asynchronous components.
Key Units:
- Genre. Situations and types of writing
- Rhetoric. How you can persuade or make more effective writing
- Argument. Academic genre
This course will focus on popular science and scientific communication.
To Do
- Get a copy of Writer/Thinker/Maker
- Attend Zoom meetings each day this week during 1:30 to 2:20 PM.
- Complete the welcome survey by Thursday.
Next Week Agenda
- Loooking over a syllabus.
Week 1 Tuesday
- Full Text vs Day 1 Slides
- Syllabi are bureaucratic documetns with a variety of stakes and audiences.
Week 1 Wednesday
- The syllabus as a social contract
- Policies determined by a policy other than the instructor. Come out of idifferent investments and negotiations institutions sit in.
- Outline expectations of instructor and student behavior.
- Some expectations are bureaucratic, others are more free
Week 1 Thursday
- Labor-based grading: you get grades based on the labor that you expend in the writing that you do.
| Grade | Missing/Incomplete Work | Extra Labor |
|---|---|---|
| 4.0 | 0 | 1 |
| 3.7 | 0 | 0 |
| 3.0 | 1 | 0 |
| 2.0 | 2 | 0 |
| 1.0 | 3+ | 0 |
- Extra labor - additional effort to contribute towards your growth outside of class assignments to contriubte to your growth as a thinker and writer.
- Soft deadlines; deadlines exist, but are slightly flexible. Assignments are due Sundays at 11:59 PM.
Why is the course structured as it is?
- Grades tend to disproportionately punish people who are already marginalized or struggling in other ways.
- Grades do not accurately communicate learning or writing quality.
- Other aspects that grades usually cover are highly subjective.
- Subjective grades affect how you interact with instructors.