English 392 

Course Description

This course is designed as a writing tutorial for a group of three students meeting once a week in the instructor's office.  For each credit that you have registered for, you will write a research paper 10-12 pages long.  The topics for these papers can come from a current course that you're taking or from your major or minor or certificate program.  Each week, you will complete one stage in the writing process and bring enough copies of that work so that everyone has his/her own to work with.  

The main activity for the course is the evaluation of each of these stages:  proposal, rough draft, complete draft, revised final draft.   Therefore, your grade comes both from the quality of the writing and your participation in the evaluations.  You will take turns reading the drafts, so that no one reads his/her own work.  Since we are meeting f2f, most of your comments will be verbal, but there will be  a short time after the paper is read for you to jot down comments and suggested improvements before the discussion begins.  We will also discuss documentation, specifically MLA guidelines, and avoiding plagiarism.

Proposal should include

  1. topic
  2. audience
  3. purpose
  4. thesis
  5. preliminary bibliography of both print and electronic sources
  6. adjunct course syllabus (papers can be written for more than one course as long as a syllabus for each different course is submitted.)

Proposal evaluation questions

  1. How will you develop your thesis?
  2. What is your conclusion? If you don't know, how will you discover it?
  3. How did you select your sources?

Rough draft should include

  1. introduction, body, and conclusion of paper
  2. supporting specifics (optional)
  3. in-text citations (optional)

Rough draft evaluation questions

  1. How does the draft carry out the ideas presented in the proposal?
  2. How are the audience and purpose shown?
  3. How good are the supporting specifics (if present)? If the paper lacks specifics, what kind of specifics (reasons, details, illustrations) do you plan to include?
  4. What is the conclusion? Does it logically come from the body of the paper?

Complete draft should include

  1. introduction, body, and conclusion with supporting specifics
  2. copies of source material cited within the paper for check of documentation skills for quotations, summaries, and paraphrases
  3. suggested improvements from rough draft evaluation

Complete draft evaluation questions

  1. How does this draft differ from the rough draft?
  2. What specifics are included? How good are they?
  3. What mechanical problems exist?
  4. How have you incorporated suggested improvements?
  5. What suggestions do you have for the revision--content, structure, mechanics, style?  

Revised (final) draft should include

  1. introduction, body, and conclusion
  2. in-text citations
  3. works cited page
  4. suggested improvements from complete draft evaluation

Revised (final) draft evaluation questions

  1. Why should this draft be considered final?
  2. How have you handled the suggested improvements?
  3. What, if any, problems did you have documenting sources?
  4. What mechanical problems were not corrected?

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