WR2 | Syllabus

Writing 2

| Weapons of Mass Instruction: Authority, Education, Pedagogy

Course Description

Writing 2-3 is an introduction to academic writing and research. This course sequence prepares you for work in a scholarly environment where you will be expected to engage in inquiry, perform analysis, and communicate clearly. We will cultivate these critical practices by reading and analyzing a series of demanding texts, discussing them together, and composing responses to them in the form of essays. Shorter writing assignments will focus on a number of skills that are important for taking part in academic conversations.

During the winter term we will turn our focus to academic research. Our libraries hold an impressive array of traditional and electronic search tools as well as millions of books, journal articles, and assorted media. Although navigating this vast sea of information is intimidating, it is important that you find your way: excellent research skills are fundamental to your undergraduate training, regardless of your chosen field of study. In consideration of its importance, we will spend a significant amount of time learning how to use our library effectively.

Course Theme

Formal education is one of the central features of our early life—a deep, organizing structure that has shaped and influenced us in profound and unaccountable ways. Education, like culture more broadly, is so ordinary and pervasive that it has become thoroughly naturalized, its powerful effects rendered virtually invisible to us. Education, in short, is something that has always been with us, something that is self-evidently the right and obvious thing to do: part of the everyday backdrop of life that we take for granted and rarely consider critically.

Although it is quite difficult to escape the naturalizing trance that comes from our habitual exposure to such common features of our lifeworld, it is important to develop a capacity for this form of analysis—to see more clearly the weird within the familiar. In this term we will try to step outside of our experiences with formal education and gain some distance on the practices and normalizing structures that have formed and shaped us since before we can even remember. If we defamiliarize these experiences by holding them at a distance and trying to see them as if for the first time, what do we see?

Health Information & Resources

Required Texts

• Open Handbook, by Alan C. Taylor.
• Other course readings are located in Canvas.

Important Links

Academic Honesty

All work submitted for this course must be your own and be written exclusively for this course. The use of sources (ideas, quotations, paraphrase) must be properly documented. Please read the Academic Honor Principle for more information about the dire consequences of plagiarism. If you are confused about when or how to cite information, please consult the course handbook or ask me about it before submitting your work.

| Since all work submitted for this course must be your own, the use of any artificial intelligence is not allowed. Any use of a LLM-based AI to brainstorm, outline, write, or edit assignments of any kind is an academic integrity violation. Similarly, students must read, summarize, and analyze our course readings without assistance from AI-derived technologies. These AI programs include, but are not limited to, bots like ChatGPT, Bard, and Claude or AI-based writing assistant tools like Grammarly, Quillbot, and WordTune.

If you have any questions about this policy or are not sure if a resource you have found will violate this policy, please ask me.

Attendance Policy

Regular attendance is expected. Bracketing religious observance, serious illness, or personal tragedy, no more than three unexcused absences in a single term will be acceptable for this course. This policy applies to:

• regular class meetings
• assigned X hours
• Tutor meetings

Four or more unexcused absences may result in repercussions ranging from significant reduction in GPA to failure of the course. If you have a religious observance that conflicts with your participation in the course, please meet with me beforehand to discuss appropriate accommodations.

| As I mention in the Health Information & Resources section above: if you are very ill, please don’t be a hero by dragging yourself into class to avoid an absence. I prefer that you consider the health of the others in our class and stay home if you have a fever or are possibly contagious. If you experience an illness or other human problem of the sort that exceeds three absences, I will definitely listen and try to work out something with you. Of course, this may not be possible if your emergency is so prolonged that it prevents meaningful participation and commitment to the course.

Typical Weekly Workflow

Here is a list of the typical assignments and activities that we will do each week:

1. Before we meet to discuss a reading as a class, each of you should carefully read and critically engage the text on your own—interrogating, analyzing, and questioning the arguments, ideas, and assumptions you discover there. What do you see? What do you think?

2. As you read, I ask that you annotate the text—that is, mark up the text by adding meaningful symbols, marginal notes, and questions on the document itself. Note: this requires that you print out the text before you begin reading it. Bring this annotated copy of the reading with you to class to help you engage in the group discussion and analysis.

3. After making your annotations, take critical notes on the text in your field notebook. These notes will be valuable to you later, when you write your essays (and perhaps further off in the future). Bring your field notebook(s) to every class meeting.

Here are longer, more detailed, descriptions of these three activities:

1. Annotating Texts

Rather than use a laptop or tablet to read our course readings, I ask that you print them out and annotate them as part of your preparations for class. Annotation refers to the process of marking up a text by adding your own words and symbols to the document itself. There is no right or wrong way to mark up a text, but you should develop a system that you are comfortable with and try to stick with it. These annotations are flags to draw the attention of your future self to certain important features of a text at some later time. One key objective during annotation is to notice a text’s structure by flagging its main components—the thesis, argumentative claims, and pieces of evidence. As we try to understand these structural components of a piece of writing, we should also be evaluating and interrogating it. We can use the margins of the text to ask questions, make brief notes, indicate confusion, define unfamiliar terms, and make connections to other texts. This work serves two purposes: first, it helps you maintain a critical focus as you read; second, it helps you later if the text must be used for study or your own writing. If you plan on being successful in college, the ability to rigorously annotate texts is perhaps the most helpful and important skill you can develop.

| Further advice and caveats about annotation may be found in the “Annotation and Critical Reading” chapter of the Open Handbook.

2. Critical Reading Notes

After annotating a text, create an entry in your field notebook and take critical notes. Recent research reveals that taking notes by hand results in a significant boost to attention, brain activity, learning, and recall. In short, experiments show that students who take notes by hand are more successful than students who do so on computers.

I’d like you to give this a try; you may later decide to memorialize these notes in electronic form, either by retyping or scanning to .pdf. Take detailed notes on each of our course texts. Since you will write essays about these texts, these notes will be of significant help to you later. Your aims here should be to:

• Reduce the entire argument to its bare essentials using paraphrase, summary, and selective quotation—carefully documenting page numbers during this activity.

• Interrogate the text by asking questions, raising objections, and making observations.

• Connect and compare the reading to other readings or ideas.

• Define any unfamiliar terms or references.

• Link the text to any outside research you perform.

At the end of this rigorous process you should have a simplified version of the essay as well as a number of critical observations, questions, and ideas that emerged in the process of reading.

| For more detailed information on the creation and purpose of these notes, read the chapter on “Critical Notes” in the Open Handbook.

3. Field Notebook Entries

Your field notebook is a record of your thinking and observations, a chronicle of your attempts to know and understand. It should contain notes, ideas, and questions about our course readings, class discussions, and anything else that seems worth noting and remembering as you explore various fields of inquiry. I like the metaphor of the field notebook as it conjures scenes of exploration, discovery, encounter, excitement, danger.

Keep a tight record of your mind’s travels.

Our objective for the field notebooks is to explore meaning, discover the argumentative structure(s) of our readings, evaluate supporting evidence, ask probing questions, connect to other readings, take notes, plan revision, and think critically. With luck, your notebook will become a central resource in our class discussions and an indispensable aid to you as you craft your essays. I’m providing these notebooks to you; if you fill yours up, just ask for another one.

Formal Papers

Students will submit three formal essays and several smaller writing assignments in response to our readings and class discussions. The formal essays focus on core features of academic writing: argumentation, synthesis, close reading, and analysis. The exact nature and objective of each assignment will be explained in greater detail throughout the course of the term.

• Formatting: During the fall term papers must be submitted in the MLA style; in the winter term we will transition to the Chicago style. Information on these styles may be found in the Open Handbook.

• Revisions: It is my practice to return essay drafts to you within one week. Afterward, you will have a minimum of one week to revise your writing. During this two-week revision cycle please feel free to drop by my office hours (or make an appointment) to go over your writing or discuss your ideas.

Grading

A few years ago I decided to quit grading, mostly as an emergency response to the realities of teaching during the COVID pandemic. Although I didn’t know it at the time, a large body of research concludes that grading is not just counterproductive, but actively harmful to the process of education. As Jesse Stommel writes, grades are “not a good measure of learning, they inhibit intrinsic motivation, and they create a competitive environment between students and hostile relationships between students and teachers.” Perhaps the foremost scholar on grading, Alfie Kohn, argues that grading produces three predicable effects in students: “less interest in learning, a preference for easier tasks, and shallower thinking” (xiv). If you think back on your experiences in high school, you may very well discover evidence of these effects in your own life.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

For the reasons described above (and others we will explore together), this class will not feature traditional letter grades for evaluation. To be sure, I will give you feedback and encouragement and promise to assist you in any way that I can. I will ask a lot of questions and try to push you to experiment and grow as a writer. You will receive similar feedback from your colleagues in the class. And you will also perform reflective self-evaluations of your writing, thinking, and effort. But at no point will this complex and important work be reduced to a percentage or letter grade.

At the end of the term we will reflect together on your progress, effort, participation, and performance; we will decide together what final grade to enter into Banner. This discussion about your performance in the class will involve our mutual reflection on the following topics:

• Participation
• Attendance
• Collaboration and sharing
• Late, incomplete, missing work
• Growth
• Effort

| There is one important caveat. To earn this right (and to pass the course), all assignments must be completed and a solid attendance record must be kept.

Help With Your Writing

There are many sources of help for your writing assignments. I am happy to meet with you all term during my office hours or by appointment. Each of you will meet with our tutor for 45 minutes each week to go over your writing and plan revision.

If you require further help, the Dartmouth Writing Center is a free support service that is dedicated to helping students through all stages of the writing process and at any point in their undergraduate careers. In one-on-one appointments, peer tutors use facilitative approaches to engage students in active dialogue about writing and help them grow as writers. Tutors can help students develop strategies for generating ideas, find and evaluate research sources, outline and organize information, and revise completed drafts. Students may schedule an appointment with a peer tutor by visiting Dartmouth Writing Center website.

Students With Disabilities

Students requesting disability-related accommodations and services for this course are required to register with Student Accessibility Services (SAS; Getting Started with SAS webpage; student.accessibility.services@dartmouth.edu; 1-603-646-9900) and to request that an accommodation email be sent to me in advance of the need for an accommodation. Then, students should schedule a follow-up meeting with me to determine relevant details such as what role SAS or its Testing Center may play in accommodation implementation. This process works best for everyone when completed as early in the quarter as possible. If students have questions about whether they are eligible for accommodations or have concerns about the implementation of their accommodations, they should contact the SAS office. All inquiries and discussions will remain confidential.

• Please make me aware of anything that may hinder your success in this course.

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Schedule of Readings and Assignments