English 1000

Student Handbook: Introduction to English 1000

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The University of Missouri-Columbia is a selective institution, which means that most of our students have good high school educations. It is also a university with a tradition of assuming that students will use writing as a method of learning in a wide variety of classes, especially through the Writing Intensive courses offered in every department. Considering these two facts, we have concluded that English 1000 shouldn’t be a course to prepare students to write college papers next semester or next year, but a course in which they write college papers immediately. This means that our English 1000 classes emphasize guided practice more than they emphasize the sort of “textbook” writing instruction we assume most students have already been exposed to in high school. The typical method of an English 1000 class is for the instructor to give students an assignment resembling one they might get in a Writing Intensive class, for the students to plunge into the work, and for the instructor to teach chiefly by coaching. Few of our teachers lecture on general principles of good writing. Instead, they workshop papers in class, write individualized comments on papers, and meet with students in one-to-one conferences. We are less concerned with whether students know how to write, in the sense that they can recite general principles, than whether they can in fact write college-level papers.

Level of Difficulty
Many students thrive under this approach, reporting on end-of-semester evaluations that they benefited greatly by being treated as apprentice writers—and as adults—rather than as students being prepared to write in some future course. Some students find the course more challenging than they expected, although most are not unduly surprised. That the GPA in the course (about 2.7 or 2.8, typically) matches the GPA in all freshman courses indicates that we have pitched the course somewhere in the mid-range of academic difficulty.

What Makes a Paper "College-Level"?
The first paragraph of this introduction ends with the statement that we are interested in having students write “college-level papers.” The phrase needs some unpacking. What makes a paper “college-level”: the vocabulary employed, the sophistication or correctness of the sentences, the amount of research involved? An argument might be made for the importance of any of these factors and many others. Our own view, based largely on familiarity with the kind of writing done in a wide range of classes at Missouri, is that a college-level paper generally

1. centers on one or more texts (rather than on personal experience, for example)
2. analyzes the text (rather than, for instance, merely summarizing it), and
3. takes a critical attitude toward the material.

By “text” we don’t always mean a written work: we may mean, for instance, a painting, a film, or a piece of music. By “critical attitude” we don’t mean simply a negative attitude or even, necessarily, a skeptical one. We mean that the student writer evaluates the text in light of such things as the author’s assumptions and likely intentions, the historical and social context in which the text was created, and the relation of the texts to other texts that preceded it or followed it.

Comparison to WI Assignments

Bio. Sci. 230 INVERTEBRATE ZOOLOGY Gerald Summers Microtheme no. 9 In this assignment, you will be discussing experimental evidence relating to an evolutionary question. As you know, the Class Gastropoda is characterized by a peculiar growth phenomenon known as torsion. Biologists have long speculated on the function of torsion and a variety of hypotheses have been proposed. Few of these hypotheses have been tested, however. A recent paper offered experimental evidence relating to proposed functions of torsion, and it provoked a response from another researcher. Pennington, J.T. and F.S. Chia. 1985. Gastropod torsion: A test of Garstang’s hypothesis. Biological Bulletin 169: 391-396. Goodhart, C.B. 1987. Garstang’s hypothesis and gastropod torsion. Journal of Molluscan Studies 53: 33-36. Read both papers (on reserve in Ellis Library) and write a 2-page essay discussing the significance of this experiment and the extent to which Pennington and Chia have responded to the question, “What is the function of torsion?” The first draft of your paper is due at the beginning of lecture Monday, 1 December. It will be returned to you in laboratory on the following Wednesday and Thursday and a revised version of your essay is due at the beginning of lecture on Wednesday, 10 December.

Peace Studies 50 Michael Ugarte 1st long paper. 5 pg. absolute minimum. Due Dec. 3 or 4: Sales’s View of Ecological Violence How is Dwellers in the Land a book about violence? In your reading and lectures you have been learning about the nature and causes of war and violence. One of the threads of much of the reading and some of the lectures has been the view that violence is likely to occur when there is some sort of imbalance: an oppressed minority (Martin Luther King), grossly unequal distribution of wealth (Menchu), an obsession with economic gain (Heller), a foreign policy based on deception rather than reality (Heller, O’Brien, Voltaire). How does that kind of imbalance (an imbalance that leads to violence) manifest itself in Dwellers in the Land? First try to come to an understanding of one of the kinds of imbalance mentioned above. Be specific and refer to readings and lectures. Then explain how that particular disequilibrium is part of Kirkpatrick Sales’s indictment of what human beings have done and continue to do to the earth.

This rather abstract definition may be more meaningful if we consider it in relation to two typical Writing Intensive assignments. The first is a short essay (microtheme) assignment from an Invertebrate Zoology class taught by Professor Gerald Summers.

Notice that Professor Summers has put his students right into the deep end of the pool. They are expected not only to understand the two scientific papers on which the assignment is based, but also to be able to discuss the “significance” of Pennington and Chia’s experiment and the “extent to which” their work properly addresses the question it purports to address. In short, they are being asked to write not as pupils in a biology class, but as biologists, ready to take a nuanced, critical attitude toward the work of other biologists.

Professor Ugarte’s Peace Studies assignment is likewise analytic and demanding. Here the paper is of fairly standard length, five pages or longer.

In this case the student is required not only to understand the argument of Kirkpatrick Sales’s book, but also to discuss something the book apparently does not: the relation of Sales’s ideas to the ideas of several other writers and to the broad theme of disequilibrium as a cause of violence.

Writing at the Edge of Understanding
Occasionally students object to the assignments given in English 1000, saying that they are too difficult, or saying that students should be allowed their choice of topics so that they can write about what they know and are already interested in. A partial answer to this objection is that if we are assigning to students the kinds of papers they will write in other college courses, then we need to help them learn to write about what they don’t yet know—what they are learning about at the time they are writing the paper. An assignment that requires students to develop their interest in an assigned topic and to write at the growing edge of their understanding more nearly parallels what lies ahead in their college careers.

Success Factors
As mentioned earlier, the average grade in English 1000 matches the average grade in freshman courses generally. Very likely the factors that account for students’ relative successes and failures in most courses are also the chief factors in English 1000. Students who are self-disciplined and mature generally fare better than those who regard classes as interruptions in their frenetic social lives. Students well prepared in high school find the course easier than those who were not well prepared. There is no great mystery here.

A writing course does, however, make some peculiar demands that are worth mentioning. The first of these is the need to manage time and attention wisely. There is a persistent myth among non-writers that good writing can be done quickly, in a rush of inspiration, adrenaline, or caffeine. In fact, most writing is more like a marathon than a sprint. And the professional writer who manages to average a publishable page per day (a book or so per year) is doing remarkably well. A steady pace that allows ample time for research, drafting, planning, and revising—and ample time for getting away from the work to regain perspective—almost always gets the best results; in fact, in order to get such results, students should plan to spend about 40 hours per paper, from the first stages of planning to the final submission. Unfortunately, a good number of freshmen papers are written the night before they are due and at a pace almost certain to produce shoddy work. Teachers can do something to encourage students to pace their writing appropriately, but finally students must manage to pace themselves.

The second demand involves attitude. We can imagine, with some effort, a student working a set of algebra problems correctly even while he or she is saying silently, “I hate this, I hate this, I hate this!” We can’t imagine a student writing a good paper under the same circumstances: writers who are constantly reminding themselves to hate writing will produce work no one takes pleasure in. Only a few people find writing the most pleasurable of all activities, but most can silence that side of them inclined to resist writing, and when they shut off the resisting voice, they can take a quiet pleasure from watching their thoughts take shape on the page. In that mood, they can do good work. Part of the student’s job (of every writer’s job, really) is to find in each assignment a way to become interested in the work.

The third demand has to do with the student writer’s relationship with his or her teacher. In broad terms, students have to choose whether to see their teacher as an adversary or as a partner. If they see the teacher as an adversary, they usually end up blaming him or her for everything that goes wrong in the course. The teacher made the wrong assignment; the teacher graded too hard; the teacher didn’t explain things properly. Having washed their hands of responsibility, such students (not surprisingly) don’t improve much over the course of a semester. Students who see the teacher as a partner assume (correctly) that progress depends on both parties taking responsibility for the success of the course. The teacher should be able to assume that on every submission, students have pushed themselves to the limit of their writing ability: otherwise, there is no reason to make any comment but “try harder.” Students must be able to assume that the teacher is genuinely interested in helping them develop as writers, and that the comments in the margin are not merely justifications of a grade, but the well-intentioned guidance a more experienced academic writer offers a less experienced colleague. If the writing process is carried on in this cooperative spirit, the result is typically a steady improvement not only of the paper but also of the writer.