English 101 and 145 - Spring 2016

Click for Fullscreen

 

Click for Fullscreen

Menominee Indian Tribe: Creating Genres with Social Purpose

One of the most important aspects of writing is understanding that every writing situation can be approached in multiple ways.  This week, we'll be looking at how the Menominee Indian Tribe in Wisconsin uses online genres such as websites, YouTube, and Facebook in order to spread awareness of tribal customs and improve the financial security of the tribe as a whole.

We'll be using these examples to help understand different approaches we can take in our Project 2 genre examples.

Read More

Research Quotes: Organizing Information

One of the keys to good research is collecting large quantities of information, and then organizing that information into a coherent narrative that others can understand.
Requirements:

1. Direct quotes have quotation marks, indirect quotes (paraphrasing) won't.
2. Each quote must have the author's last name listed (following MLA in-text citation)
3. I encourage you to give a line or two of your personal thoughts about the quote, but this is not required.  (Something like "I like this quote because..." or "This indicates that..."
4. For each quote, include 1-3 keywords (think hashtags).  Something like "genre convention...." or "CHAT term..."

Read More

Quick Note: If this feels like busy work, you’re doing it wrong. Seriously. Write down the weirdest / most interesting quotes you find. Don’t worry about how they’ll fit. That’s what the outline is for.

Avoiding Plagiarism through Good Research Practices

For today's discussion, our goal is to look at how effective research practices can help us avoid plagiarism and protect us from false accusations.

Topic 1: Research Practices
Here, we consider which research practices help avoid plagiarism. Think about how some of cases were accidental versus purposeful. And what about the case where no plagiarism occurred? How might an author defend his or her work against a false accusation? What documents would be needed to provide such a defense?

Topic 2: Why Plagiarism Hurts Scholarship
In this topic, we're going to look at how plagiarism hurts research as a whole. In what ways can plagiarized papers "cheapen" the work of others?

Topic 3: How Do We Identify Plagiarism?

This is a complex topic. I'm not looking for "right" or "final" answers here - instead, we're just bringing up the issues as a way to understand the difficult complexities here.

Read More

Project 1 Proposal

The discussion for Project 1 is very open. There's no specific research component required - I'm mostly checking to see that you know the difference between writing research and content research in terms of how you'll approach you project. So describe the writing genre you want to research for Project 1, and I'll post replies to let you know if you're on the right track.

Overall: Genre, Topic, Details
The main things I'm looking for are that

1. You've identified a genre of writing you'd like to study.
2. You can talk about the topic where you've seen this genre and why that's important to you.
3. You're able to give some details about how you'd research the genre.

Continue Reading

Emperor's Soul as a Metaphor for Writing

Brandon Sanderson's The Emperor's Soul offers one of the best metaphors for the writing process that I've seen.  For today's discussion, we're going to consider how this metaphor works within our differing fields of interest, and then we'll follow-up with research approaches for Project 1.  By the end of this discussion, you should have four posts that provide potential research sources for your Project 1:

1. A Main Post, where you describe your field of interest, and then relate writing in this field to a quote from The Emperor's Soul.  This main post should also include an attached PDF of a scholarly article you found via Milner Library.  (see the next blog post for Videos on Finding Scholarly Sources via Milner.)
2. Three Response Posts.  As in past discussions, each response should refer to a specific point made by one of your classmates (or to my initial post), provide your own thoughts, and then an outside quote or example to support your point (see #3 below).
3. Three quotes for Outside Support.  For each response post, your outside support can be any one of the following: a new quote from Emperor's Soul, a link to a website that you find interesting, or a quote from your Milner article (see #1 above).

Continue Reading
Return to ENG 145 Week 2

Finding Scholarly Articles on Milner

Next week will largely focus on finding good sources for your Project 1 research.  One of the key components for the project is finding useful scholarly sources via Milner Library.  Here's a series of videos that use the example of Trayvon Martin and Twitter to provide tips for finding useful sources. Note that the videos also reveals some of the frustrations of research - not every search will bring up what you're looking for.  These videos are not required for the course, but hopefully the can be helpful as you start thinking about Project 1.

Read More

Twitter, Trayvon Martin, and Writing Research

This week, we have a few key goals toward developing your skills as writing researchers. In this discussion about Trayvon Martin, I'm looking for each of you to develop three skills:

1. Identify genre conventions (in this case, of Twitter and Mass Media)
2. Correlate these genre conventions with CHAT
3. Select relevant quotes from the articles to support your points

Continue Reading
Back to ENG 145 Week 2

Discussion Post: CHAT and Everyday Writing

In this discussion, I want you each to choose a genre that you've written recently (within the past couple months or so) and describe your writing in terms of Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT).

To understand CHAT, see these readings from Week 1:

• Edel: In the Twilight of the Modern Age
• Prior: Mapping Literate Activity (just the one page)

 Click "read more" to see an example of how I apply CHAT to blogging.

ENG 145 - Week 1

ENG 145 - Summer 2015 - Writing in the Academic Disciplines

The goal of English 145 is to help each student better approach writing in a variety of academic disciplines.  In contrast to many writing courses, the focus isn't on teaching "the one good way to write."  Instead, we use writing research to help understand how writing changes depending on context.  Through genre studies, we examine how your goals and your audience will affect the success of your writing.  Just as each professor will have different expectations of "good" writing, you'll find that every field of study has different expectations for scholarship.  The goal of the course is to help you identify the expectations of your own field and then adjust your writing accordingly.

Additional Links:

• Click to Open Syllabus in a New Window
• ISU Writing Program Course Design Requirements for ENG 145

English 145 - Spring 2013 - Section 006

For English 145, Writing in the Academic Disciplines, the focus of our course will be using rhetorical genre studies to better understand the social effects of genres.  By applying Cultural-Historical Activity Theory to specific long-term projects, we'll examine how the production and distribution of written materials can significantly affect its social trajectory.

Course Policies - Schedule - Lesson Plans