Requirements for Joy Passanante's English 208 Sections 

Attendance and Class Participation

*You are expected to contribute to our community of writers and readers by carefully considering and critiquing the work of others and offering your own work for critique. 

*If you are in class every time, I will add points to your grade.  

*More than 3 unexcused absences will affect your grade. More than 3 weeks of excused absences will also affect your grade.  Since so much of the class depends on in-class writing and response, it is impossible to make up all the work needed to complete the course satisfactorily. If you miss 4 weeks (8 class periods) of classes for any reason, that means you have missed more than a fourth of the class; that grade is not a passing one. 

*You may be quizzed on the reading assignments.   

Readings

Required attendance at two English department-sponsored readings or literary events. To fulfill one of these requirements, you are expected to attend Hemingway/PEN Award-winner Brigid Pasulka’s reading on October 6 as one of these requirements. A typed, 1-page response to each one is due a week after the event: one paragraph describing the event; at least one more detailing your and the audience’s complex response.

 Exercises

You will write both in and out of class a series of short assignments for practice in various aspects of writing.  

Completed Essays

You will fully develop and polish (this means mastery of mechanics, syntax, diction, etc.) approximately 3 full-fledged essays.  I will evaluate them on all aspects of writing. Only the first essay may be revised for another grade. 

Conferences

Conferences are an important part of the learning process.  In order to see all my writing students, I will occasionally substitute conferences for class. 

I expect you to hand in work on time, although if you have a good reason and ask permission, I will allow you to hand in papers 1 class period late without lowering your grade. Between classes you may turn in papers to my mailbox in the Brink mailroom.  I do not read papers as e-mail attachments.         

 English 207, 208, and 209 all share the following goals:

          1. To understand how a writer’s aim shapes and is shaped by other variables, such as topic, audience, rhetorical situation, and genre.

          2. To develop a greater awareness and control of formal features in writing, such as arrangement, style, and mechanics.

          3. To strengthen the ability to read critically and to analyze how writers present their ideas in view of their probable purposes, audiences, and occasions for writing.

          4. To strengthen the ability to collect and evaluate information from a variety of sources and to use the research process as a vehicle for extending the writer’s and others’ understanding of an issue or topic.