Learning Goals and Objectives:

We all make thousands of rhetorical decisions each day. I would like to expand your awareness of these opportunities, recognizing how they impact your well-being and how you can make the most of them.

• Arrive at an expanded sense of what rhetoric is and what it can do for you.
• Arrive at an expanded sense of what writing is and what it can do for you.
• Become more conscious of your individual writing process. Maximize strengths and be less constrained by weaknesses. 

Build Skill Sets

• Improve ability to read with awareness of audience, context, author, genre conventions, and text purpose. 
• Conduct rhetorical analyses with an eye towards common social biases. 
• Distinguish an academic thesis from a popular commonplace. 
• Learn academic conventions around making a claim, orienting it within ongoing dialogues, and gracefully introducing quotes that support your claim.
• Make and use a reverse outline. 
• Structure paragraphs for maximum effectiveness, employing powerful topic sentences.
• Develop more awareness around issues of style, including grammar and punctuation.

Course Components

Methods

I do my best to stay abreast of developments in educational science and to use the methods currently deemed most effective. Accordingly, my aim is to make this classroom a site for “active learning.” What that means practically is that I will be talking less and you will be talking (and doing) more. Please be ready to discuss the readings!  

Writing

The bulk of this course’s writing assignments are casual and low stakes. You will be graded on whether you completed them, but you will not be penalized for issues of grammar or style. At the same time, it is essential that you complete these low-stakes assignments to the best of your ability as they are “feeder” assignments you will use to compose your papers. In other words, the quality of your work on these “feeder” assignments determines the quality of the material you have to work with when it comes time to compose your formal work. 

Course Policies

Classroom Environment

This course touches on some sensitive issues, so it’s important that everyone keep an open and compassionate outlook. We are here to challenge our assumptions and learn new ways of thinking and knowing, and that’s easiest to do in a classroom where students feel safe sharing their most authentic points of view. The keyword is empathy. Please be respectful and thoughtful in your approaches to one another, recognizing that in this class (and in college in general) you are likely to encounter people whose outlooks and values differ from your own. Please be kind.

Deadline Policy

In the working world, you will likely be required to meet strict deadlines. Because I always have multiple competing deadlines of my own, I need you to start practicing time-management now and hand in your work on time. Life can get complicated and unforeseen obstacles arise. Please plan accordingly! If you do need to hand in an assignment late, please notify me over email and let me know when you think you can have it finished.

Absence, Participation, and Lateness Policy

Class participation is 20% of your grade. Writing may seem like a solitary enterprise, but there’s an awful lot of give and take involved. Listening, sharing, offering thoughtful feedback, and generally being supportive of your peers are all forms of participation. It’s hard to make ourselves vulnerable by reading our work aloud, but it’s good for us to get it out there! Obviously, you can’t participate if you’re not present, so missing class without an approved reason will harm your class participation grade. Being more than 10 minutes late to class three times counts as one absence. 

                  Please do your best to make it to class. While I understand that students must sometimes miss class for good reasons, unfortunately I will almost never have enough time to catch you up if you miss one. If you do have to miss class, please contact a classmate for notes. 

E-mail Etiquette

As one of your first points of contact with the college, I’d like to ensure you’re savvy to essential aspects of the culture. Emails to professors that begin with “hey!” or that don’t contain a subject in the subject line are likely to annoy the people who will be grading you and writing your recommendation letters. Even if a professor seems casual and you have a good rapport, always begin emails with “Dear Professor [name]” and end emails with something like “Thanks, [your name]” or “Best, [your name].” Trust me on this one. If the professor responds quickly and the single email becomes an email thread, it’s okay to respond more casually. However, in general, I recommend erroring on the side of formality. 

Classroom Etiquette

Similarly, certain classroom behaviors that might have been acceptable in high school won’t play well here. I don’t recommend putting your head down on your desk, sleeping, wearing head- or earphones, or otherwise refusing to engage. Such behaviors will almost certainly offend and/or greatly concern your instructor.  

Academic Integrity and Plagiarism

All work submitted for credit for this course must be your own work. If, in writing your paper, you use other legitimate scholarly sources (e.g., books/journal articles, scholarly online resources such as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy), then you must cite them and give full and accurate credit to those sources. The use of illegitimate sources, such as SparkNotes or CliffNotes or Wikipedia, and innumerable personal websites and the like, is forbidden – because these sources are never as good as the legitimate sources. Legitimate scholarly sources do not substitute for reading the assigned texts and doing your best to understand them.

Concealment of sources, attempting to pass off the work of others as your own, etc., such as copying from any source, or even paraphrasing from a source without fully crediting the source, constitutes plagiarism. Plagiarism will result in a failing grade for that work, and may result in a failing grade for the course, and being reported for plagiarism to the college. Cite and credit everything, quite simply, except your own class notes. 

            “Academic dishonesty is prohibited in The City University of New York.  Penalties for academic dishonesty include academic sanctions, such as failing or otherwise reduced grades, and/or disciplinary sanctions, including suspension or expulsion.”  All violations are reported to the Department and college’s Academic Integrity Officer.

For detailed information on definitions and examples of Academic Dishonesty, including Cheating, Plagiarism, Obtaining Unfair Advantage and Falsification of Records and Documents, please refer to the student handbook or visit: http://lehman.smartcatalogiq.com/en/2017-2019/Undergraduate-Bulletin/Academic-Services-and-Policies/Academic-Integrity