Course Information

ENGL 2100 — Lit and Humanities: Fight The Power
Section 09F
CRN: 10933
Online Course
Asynchronous Instruction

Course Description, from the University's Academic Catalog

Examination of literature as an expression of the humanities through study of several complete works from at least two historical periods, two genres, and two cultures/countries. Includes an essay or projects involving documentation.

Course Dates

January 13: Full Term, Classes Begin, Attendance Verification must be completed on the first class meeting day
January 13-16: Full Term, Drop/Add, Ends at 11:59 P.M. on January 16
January 20: Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday - Administrative offices closed - No classes
March 10: Full Term, Last day to withdraw without academic penalty
March 17-22: Spring break for students
May 5: Full Term, Last Day of Classes
May 8: 3:00-5:00 Final Exam

Learning Outcomes/ Career Readiness Competencies

Learning Outcomes are the knowledge or skills you should gain (and be able to demonstrate) by the end of a particular course.

Career Readiness Competencies are competencies developed by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE). They address eight areas where employers agree that your abilities and skills signify your readiness to begin and/or extend your career. Below are the skills you'll have the opportunity to practice in this course.

Learning Outcomes:

Upon successful completion of this course, you should be able to:

• Effectively analyze and interpret the meaning, cultural significance, and ethical implications of literary texts.
• Demonstrate familiarity with literary language, periods, and genres.

Career Readiness Competencies contained within this course:

Self-Development	Communication
Display curiosity; seek out opportunities to learn. Assume duties or positions that will help one progress professionally. Seek and embrace development opportunities. Voluntarily participate in further education, training, or other events to support one’s career.	Understand the importance of and demonstrate verbal, written, and non-verbal/body language, abilities. Employ active listening, persuasion, and influencing skills. Communicate in a clear and organized manner so that others can effectively understand. Frame communication with respect to diversity of learning styles, varied individual communication abilities, and cultural differences.
Critical Thinking	Equity and Inclusion
Make decisions and solve problems using sound, inclusive reasoning and judgment. Gather and analyze information from a diverse set of sources and individuals to fully understand a problem. Proactively anticipate needs and prioritize action steps. Accurately summarize and interpret data with an awareness of personal biases that may impact outcomes. Effectively communicate actions and rationale, recognizing the diverse perspectives and lived experiences of stakeholders.	Solicit and use feedback from multiple cultural perspectives to make inclusive and equity-minded decisions. Seek global cross-cultural interactions and experiences that enhance one’s understanding of people from different demographic groups and that leads to personal growth. Keep an open mind to diverse ideas and new ways of thinking.
Leadership	Professionalism
Seek out and leverage diverse resources and feedback from others to inform direction. Use innovative thinking to go beyond traditional methods. Plan, initiate, manage, complete, and evaluate projects.	Act equitably with integrity and accountability to self, others, and the organization. Be present and prepared. Demonstrate dependability (e.g., report consistently for work or meetings). Prioritize and complete tasks to accomplish organizational goals. Consistently meet or exceed goals and expectations. Have an attention to detail, resulting in few if any errors in their work. Show a high level of dedication toward doing a good job
Teamwork	Technology
Listen carefully to others, taking time to understand and ask appropriate questions without interrupting. Effectively manage conflict, interact with and respect diverse personalities, and meet ambiguity with resilience. Be accountable for individual and team responsibilities and deliverables. Employ personal strengths, knowledge, and talents to complement those of others. Exercise the ability to compromise and be agile.	Navigate change and be open to learning new technologies. Use technology to improve efficiency and productivity of their work. Identify appropriate technology for completing specific tasks. Manage technology to integrate information to support relevant, effective, and timely decision-making. Quickly adapt to new or unfamiliar technologies. Manipulate information, construct ideas, and use technology to achieve strategic goals.

These career readiness skills will serve you well no matter what your next steps after graduation might be. Find out more about them on this page of the NACE site.

Required Material

All reading selections for this class are available as pdf files in Folio, in the Texts folder.

COURSE STRUCTURE

General

This section gives you a brief introduction to the way you'll walk through the course. More detail on each area is available below.

Modules
The course has 24 modules that present information on historical and literary periods, the authors we're covering, and the texts we're reading. Each module contains links to texts, web pages and sites, a podcast about the text or period, a number of questions you should consider as you read the text, and a quiz.

Discussion Forums
Throughout the course, you'll be responding to three discussion questions in the discussion forums, and then offering secondary responses to three initial posts done by other students. The forums themselves are arranged so that you have to post your own response first in order to see what others have said.

Podcasts
Each module has a podcast that walks through the primary material in the module. A page with links to all the podcasts is located at this URL: jpellegrino.com/teaching/ENGL2100/FightthePower/000-Podcasts.html.

Papers
You'll write two short papers for this class, both tied to the course learning outcomes. For these, you'll produce a multi-paragraph document of between 500 and 600 words which addresses the prompt thoroughly and demonstrates your knowledge. These essays should be typed and double-spaced, with a 12-point font, and your name in the upper left corner of the first page. You'll submit them to the appropriate dropboxes in Folio, where they will go through the TurnItIn check for academic honesty.

Exams
We'll have two multiple-choice exams, one halfway through the course and one at the end of the course.

Modules

Course modules are located within Folio/D2L. You should begin your work there, within Folio. If the module concerns a particular text or texts, it will also have a link to the text. Sometimes those texts will be pdf files in Folio, and sometimes those texts will be web pages that contain introductory material about historical periods and intellectual movements.

Modules also contain the following:

Links - These go to external sites for background information and podcasts about the historical, cultural, and biographical information behind each text, and literary and thematic interpretations of each text.

Podcasts - These are in mp3 format. You can either download them or stream them. You should listen to the podcast in each module after you've read the primary text for the module.

Quizzes - You'll take a quiz in each module after you've read the material, checked out the links, and listened to the podcast.

Discussion Questions - These are questions you might consider as you read the text in each module. Eventually you'll respond to one discussion question of your choosing for each major period we're covering (a total of four questions).

The numbered modules all address texts and authors. The lettered modules are discussion prompts. Those lettered modules are where you'll address a discussion question of your choosing from the modules within that particular historical period.

Readings

As you will see in the schedule below, there are a variety of genres represented in this class, but there's quite a bit of poetry, more than some of you may be comfortable with. I've set up the class this way for two reasons; the first is philosophical and the second is practical. Primarily, I think the best way to capture the zeitgeist of a particular historical moment, or to understand the impact of a literary movement, is through poetry. Works in this genre contain far more distilled language than those in any other genre, so it's easier to get at the essence of the subject at hand. Also, studying poetry allows us to cover far more ground. We could spend the semester reading only novels, but the nature of the academic calendar means that we would deal with far fewer texts, and you'd be familiar with far fewer authors.

At a practical level, all of the reading material I'll pass to you is in the Adobe portable document format (.pdf). Since this is an online class, you can, of course, read all this material on a computer or another device. However, for some of the longer works (namely Candide, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass . . ., and Death and the King's Horseman), I'd suggest printing out the text to read it, because going through these longer pieces can get tiring if you're looking at them on a screen.

Notes

Another reason for printing out the texts is that you can take much better notes on them that way. And make no mistake about it, YOU SHOULD BE TAKING NOTES ON THESE WORKS AS YOU READ THEM. Believe me, you will have a much harder time in this class if you don't take notes on what you're reading.

Taking notes is an essential part of the reading process. It helps you internalize difficult ideas by putting them into your own words and can help you be more focused when you're reviewing for the exams. You're far more likely to remember material you have thought about and made notes on than material you have read passively.

Many people find it effective to take notes in two stages:

1. Write down the main points (the setting, major plot points, characters, etc.)
2. Summarize, condense, and organize those initial notes, making as many connections between those notes and your own experiences as you can.

But there are dozens of different ways to take good notes, so you should be working with a process that makes it easy for you to remember what you read.

In general, your notes should be brief and to the point.

• Don't attempt to write everything down, just reflect the main themes. Aim to get the gist of the topic or the main points.
• If you come across something you don't understand (especially in the podcasts), make a note of it and come back to it later.
• Don't lose track of your purpose in taking these notes in the first place; keep focused.
• Don't worry about whether anyone else could make sense of your notes; you're the only person who needs to read them.

If you come to see me to ask how you should study for the exams, or even what you should be studying for those exams, the first thing I'm going to ask is to see the notes you've taken on the texts and on the podcasts. If you don't have any notes from your reading and listening, or if those notes are thin and incomplete, there's not much I can do to help you succeed in this class.

Exams

We'll have two multiple-choice exams, one halfway through the course and one at the end of the course. These will be 33 questions each, with roughly 1/3 of the questions in these three areas: identification of a text, historical and cultural contexts for a text, and thematic concerns within a text.

Exams are available from midnight to midnight on the dates noted in the schedule. You may take the exam at any time on the day that is it available. For your first exam, once you open the exam, you'll have one hour to complete and submit it. For your second exam, since it is the final (but it is not cumulative), once you open the exam you'll have two hours to complete and submit it.

Exams are listed on the syllabus, on the schedule, and in the calendar in Folio. If you miss an exam because you misread the date, or because you didn't check any of the multiple places that tell you when it is, you should not expect to take it at a later date. If, however, circumstances cause you to need to take an exam early, please let me know and we will come to some accommodation.

Papers

You will get two bites of this apple, because the prompts for each of these essays will be almost exactly the same, and they will directly address the Learning Outcomes for this course.

You'll write two short papers for this class, both tied to the course learning outcomes. For these, you'll produce a multi-paragraph document of between 500 and 600 words which addresses the prompt thoroughly and demonstrates your knowledge. These essays should be typed and double-spaced, with a 12-point font, and your name in the upper left corner of the first page. You'll submit them to the appropriate dropboxes in Folio, where they will go through the TurnItIn check for academic honesty.

In a nutshell, you'll choose one of the texts we've covered up to a certain point in the class, then discuss the meaning, cultural significance, and ethical implications of that text, both for its original audience and for us today.

You may use external sources in your essays, and if you do you will need to acknowledge where you got your information from. And if you use the source's language, put it in quotation marks.

My comments on your papers will be available to you through the Grademark view in the TurnItIn section (click on your TurnItIn score to access this).

Quizzes

Each module has a quiz at its end, with multiple-choice questions. The number of questions in each quiz varies. At the end of the course, when I'm calculating your grades, I'll drop your lowest three quiz scores.

Discussion Forums

Each module contains a number of discussion questions. These serve two purposes. On a day-to-day basis, they should help you direct your reading as you go through the texts. And as we finish each major historical period (the Enlightenment, Romanticism, Modernism/Contemporary), you'll choose one question from the works covered in that period and respond to it in a well-considered piece of writing that should be over 500 words. You'll then post your response (this is your "primary entry") to the appropriate discussion forum. After you've submitted your primary entry to the forum, you'll be able to see the entries of others in the class. You should read the primary entries of at least two other students, and respond with substantive comments to two of those entries (these are your "secondary entries"). You can agree, disagree, question someone's interpretation, add your own interpretation, etc., but you can't just say "You're so right! I totally agree!" You have to further the conversation.

You need to write in complete sentences and paragraphs, with a level of care for the academic code so that your classmates will not be puzzled by your post.

Good posts are substantive in content. While it’s nice give brief feedback like “thanks” and “good idea” to your classmates, they do not count toward your graded contributions.

• Good posts back up their examples and opinions with sufficient evidence, so your readers will believe what you say.
• Good posts are thoughtful and well-composed. And spelling and grammar both count.
• Good posts are responsive either to the initial question or to someone’s primary entry.

Plagiarism in the Forums
The material from the Student Code of Conduct outlined below applies also to your work in the discussion forums. Don't cut and paste from another site. Don't alter every fifth or sixth word from another site and claim the work as your own. Don't attempt to hide the fact that you're using someone else's ideas. There's nothing wrong with using other sites, other critics, or other commentaries on the texts, as long as you give them credit.

Your work will be evaluated with the rubric included below, so take a look at it before you post.

COURSE EXPECTATIONS

Learning Commitment

The "Carnegie Unit" is how universities define credit hours and categorize the amount of work students do for each credit hour. Each credit requires fifteen "contact hours" which are essentially the hours you spend in class during the semester. And each contact hour requires two hours of outside work, or time devoted to the class that doesn't happen in the class. This is a three-credit course, with 45 contact hours. Those 45 contact hours necessitate at least 90 hours of out-of-class work on your part. That's at least 135 hours committed for each three-credit class that you take.

It's easy to lose sight of this fact in an online course. And I certainly didn't set up this course thinking that you'll devote exactly nine hours each week to it. But remember, reading takes time. You might need a full nine hours to read some of the longer texts we're covering in this class.

If you're not a self-starter, or you have problems with deadlines, or you just don't think you can commit to this level of work, you should probably look for another section of this class.

Academic Integrity

I expect that you will conduct yourself within the guidelines of the Honor System. All academic work should be completed with the high level of honesty and integrity that this University demands.

I do not tolerate academic dishonesty. Beyond the moral implications, I find it insulting. All instances of plagiarism will be reported to the Office of Student Conduct. Any instance will result in an F in the course and possibly further sanctions. Plagiarism is presenting someone else's work as your own without giving them credit. Someone else is defined as anyone other than you: another student, a friend, relative, a source on the Internet, articles or books. And work is defined as ideas as well as language. So taking someone else's ideas and putting them in your own words—or using someone else's words to express your ideas—is plagiarism. And, in the case of friends and family, it doesn't matter if they give you permission.

A note about group work: I encourage you to read and discuss these texts together outside of class. It is, in fact, the core of our endeavor, to hone our own ideas on these texts through discussions with others. You should also discuss your writing with your classmates, as hearing a number of ideas will help you create and polish your own. However, this does not mean that you should write your papers as a group. While discussion is obviously a group activity, writing is a solitary one, and should be treated as such. Any attempt to subvert this would be an instance of academic dishonesty.

The University has a more extensive definition of Academic Dishonesty (from the Student Conduct Code):

CHEATING

1. submitting material that is not yours as part of your course performance;
2. using information or devices that are not allowed by the faculty;
3. obtaining and/or using unauthorized materials;
4. fabricating information, research, and/or results;
5. violating procedures prescribed to protect the integrity of an assignment, test, or other evaluation;
6. collaborating with others on assignments without the faculty's consent;
7. cooperating with and/or helping another student to cheat;
8. demonstrating any other forms of dishonest behavior.

PLAGIARISM

1. directly quoting the words of others without using quotation marks or indented format to identify them;
2. using sources of information (published or unpublished) without identifying them;
3. paraphrasing materials or ideas without identifying the source;
4. Self-plagiarism: re-submitting work previously submitted without explicit approval from the instructor;
5. unacknowledged use of materials prepared by another person or agency engaged in the selling of term papers or other academic material.

Should you wish to pursue a case of academic dishonesty through the Office of Student Conduct, I will speak at your hearing and send a copy of this syllabus along with the documents in question to the Hearing Officer, so a plea of ignorance or non-malicious intent on your part will not be valid.

COURSE SCHEDULE

Since this class is wholly online, you have much greater flexibility in managing the time you put into this course. Rather than assigning a specific date for your completion of each module, I will list the modules due for each week, and you are free to complete them at the times of your choosing during that week. For our purposes here, the only deadline you have each week is Friday at midnight. That's when all material for the week is due.

Introductory materials about literary or intellectual periods or movements are in purple.
Individual authors and their works are in green..
Discussion posts and papers are in red..
Exams and their availability are in yellow.

Week (date)	Modules (and their quizzes) Due	Other Material Due
1 (1/17)	Introduction to the Course Module 1: Introduction to The Enlightenment
2 (1/24)	Module 2: Voltaire, Candide 1 Module 3: Voltaire, Candide 2
3 (1/31)	Module 4: Saikaku, from Life of a Sensuous Woman
4 (2/7)	Module 5: Introduction to Romanticism Module 6: Blake, poetry	Discussion Forum 1 primary posts
5 (2/14)	Module 7: Keats, poetry Module 8: Whitman, poetry	Discussion Forum 1 secondary posts
6 (2/21)	Module 9: Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave 1 Module 10: Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave 2
7 (2/28)	Module 11: Tagore, "Punishment"	Discussion Forum 2 primary posts
8 (3/7)	3/4: Exam 1 Available Module 12: Yeats, poetry	Discussion Forum 2 secondary posts
9 (3/14)	Module 13: Introduction to Modernism Module 14: Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
10 (3/28)	Module 15: Akhmatova, "Requiem"	PAPER 1
11 (4/4)	Module 16: Négritude Module 17: Senghor, poetry
12 (4/11)	Module 18: Existentialism Module 19: Borowski, "This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen" Module 20: Marquez, "Death Constant Beyond Love"
13 (4/18)	Module 21: Mahfouz, "Zaabalawi" Module 22: Walcott, poetry	Discussion Forum 3 primary posts
14 (4/25)	Module 23: Soyinka, Death and the King’s Horseman	Discussion Forum 3 secondary posts
15 (5/2)	Module 24: Heaney, poetry
5/7		PAPER 2
5/9	5/9: Exam 2 Available

INSTRUCTOR

Dr. Pellegrino

I'm Dr. Joe Pellegrino, an Associate Professor in the Literature department. I teach lots of different classes. My specialties are Irish literature and postcolonial literature, so I end up doing classes that don't fit into the standard Brit Lit/American Lit model: Irish lit, African lit, etc. But I also do canonical figures. For instance, this semester I'm also teaching a graduate seminar on the poetry of T.S Eliot.

It seems like I went to school forever, and went to lots of different schools: Duquesne University, St, Louis University, Mannes College of Music, The New England Conservatory, and UNC-Chapel Hill, which is where I did my last degree. I've also taught at a lot of schools: Duquesne, UNC, Eastern Kentucky University, University of South Carolina-Upstate, Greenville Tech, Converse College, and here at GS. I've got some experience in online education; I was a University Director for the (short-lived) Kentucky Commonwealth Virtual University, and have taught online classes for over 20 years now.

Professionally, I also edit an international journal, The International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. I'm interested in a number of fields, but most of my publications are either on Irish studies, postcolonial lit, or teaching. I'm currently ghost-writing the University's Compliance Certification Narrative, a once-a-decade production that we give to our accrediting body so we can keep the doors open for the next 10 years. When it's all done, it'll be about 800 pages of text, with over 4,000 separate files linked to it.

I have only one item on my bucket list: to see the Northern Lights. One day I'll get there, but in the meantime I'm raising two daughters, making heirloom furniture (pretty much a middle-aged guy cliché), keeping up with new technology, wishing I could spend more time doing music, and trying to keep my head above water.

Contact Information

Office:
Room 3308B, Newton Building
Phone: 912.478.5953
Office Hours: MW, 12:00 - 4:00
Email: jpellegrino@georgiasouthern.edu

English Department in Statesboro:
Room 1118, Newton Building
622 COBA Drive
Statesboro, GA 30460
912.478.0141

In-person and Virtual Office Hours

During the semester, I will be working half-time at the University's Office of Institutional Assessment and Accreditation. That means I'll be in my office in Newton for in-person only on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

I'll be available for drop-ins, or be able to zoom with you, on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 12 noon to 3 pm. I can be available at other times on those days, but you'll need to email me to set up an appointment for those times.

A WORD ABOUT EMAIL

OK, maybe two words: CONTENT and FORM

CONTENT
Please don't hesitate to post to me if you have a question about any of the readings, especially if you're struggling to figure them out. But please think twice about posting questions where the answer is in this syllabus. If you do, I have two options for a reply: I can copy and paste material from the syllabus or schedule just for you—because you didn't actually check it yourself—or I can reply with something like "check the syllabus" or "check the schedule." Both of these options are redundant, because you already have access to the answer to your question, and you should already know to check the syllabus. And both of these options reflect poorly on your abilities, either to understand what is required of you or to comprehend what you have read. Since I don't want to think less of your abilities, neither of these options are satisfactory. So if you ask a question that is already answered in the syllabus or in the schedule, I won't be replying at all.

FORM
See that image right above this? It's not just some funny advice about how to write an email to one of your instructors or teaching assistants; it's a guide to acting like an adult, so it's something we expect you to follow. When you write anything, you change the form to suit the content. So you don't write an email to a professor like you're writing a DM to your friend. Look at the graphic, then follow the rules on it.

And as with the questions that have already been answered in this syllabus, I could embarrass you by reminding you of those rules when you don't follow them, or I could just not respond to you until you actually get it right. And just in case you can't parse what those rules are, I'll put them into a list:

• My name is not "Hey," "Yo," "'Sup," or "Dude" — use a proper greeting.
• Don't use acronyms or texting shorthand — write in full sentences. Use a grammar checker.
• Spell-check it before you send it. When you have tools available to you and you don't use them, you're not only demonstrating that you don't know how to communicate at anything beyond a middle-school level, you're also demonstrating your inability to use simple tools in order to make yourself look better.
• Check the syllabus before you make yourself look foolish (see the previous point).
• Sign your name.

So let me sum this all up:
if you don't hear back from me after you sent me an email, it's either because you can't write an email correctly for the audience you're trying to address, or you're asking a question that I've already answered in this document.

CLASS POLICIES

Writing Proficiency

If you need additional work on the surface features of your writing, I'll let you know. Basically, if I can't understand what you're trying to say in your first paper, then you'll have to work at writing more clearly. I'll ask you to schedule sessions at the Writing Center in order to be more successful on your next paper.

The reason professors make students write papers is not because we love to mark them up, or because we somehow enjoy this. I'm willing to bet that every professor you ask would say that marking and grading papers is the worst part of their job. I know it is for me. The only thing that makes it bearable is hoping that I'll be able to engage with your ideas, or see the texts we're covering through your eyes. But if I have to stop after every sentence to figure out what you're trying to say, I'm most certainly not thinking about your ideas.

So do yourself a favor: give yourself enough time to do a good job on these papers. Remember that writing clearly takes far more time than you think it does, because you have to consider your argument from a reader's perspective, not your perspective.

I realize that the grand academic dance of submitting your work, having it evaluated, then responding to that evaluation (either through improving your work in your next paper, or by coming to see me in my office) is essentially a negotiation between us. You want to demonstrate your abilities with X amount of work, an amount that you think deserves a certain grade. You submit your work without knowing how others will see it, and only become aware of their perceptions when your work is returned to you with my comments. But this puts you at a disadvantage, because, as in any negotiation, the party that makes the first move does so blindly, and so gives up any hope of advantage.

So in the spirit of openness, let me make the first move, and try to level the playing field by giving you a few tips:

• I'll begin with a personal comment:
  I know my reputation precedes me, and I know what it is, that I'm one of the closest and cruelest readers of student work in the English Department. I mark every little error. I ask condescending questions. I expect too much from you. My classroom demeanor and my grading don't match.
       While I don't revel in that description, it's pretty accurate. I don't believe it's too much to ask that your subjects agree with your verbs, your tenses are consistent, and you write like you know what you're doing. Expecting anything less from you, or assuming that you can't write for an academic audience, is an insult to your intelligence and abilities.
  
• This is academic writing, where clarity and concision are essential. If your work isn't clear, if every sentence doesn't hang together, you're losing the negotiation. What you have written may make sense to you, but it needs to make sense to your readers as well.
  
• At the post-secondary level, your writing isn't evaluated in terms of the amount of work you put into it. Just like any other skill, the amount of effort necessary to master academic writing varies from person to person. I am sure that it would take me far more effort than most of you to get back to playing football. But even if I did ten times the work you did, when we both showed up on the field we'd be evaluated on our skills, not on the time it took us to gain them.
  
• If you pay attention to what the prompt is asking you to write about, and keep that in mind as you think about your paper, you're making a good start.
  
• If you look at the rubric, especially the distinctions between the levels of performance in content and form, you should get a good idea of how successful your paper will be.
  
• If you're wondering if your "X amount of work" is enough, it isn't.
  
• I'll conclude with one last personal comment:
  Before we had things like TurnItIn and other automatic checkers on academic integrity, I was the guy other faculty members went to to track down cases of suspected plagiarism. When Google was just getting off the ground, I was a beta tester for them (one of 25 in the country). I've also been teaching English for over 40 years now. So if you're thinking that you've changed enough of the material that you've copied and pasted to make it look like your own work, think again. If writing and evaluating papers is a negotiation, then presenting someone else's work as your own is a gamble, and you're betting your academic career that you can get away with it. I've just told you what I bring to the table, so if you really think you can get away with it, my only advice is to do it as early as possible, so you can spare yourself the work for the rest of semester, because you'll have already failed this class.

Course Work

All electronically-submitted assignments will be placed in the appropriate dropbox section or discussion forum of the Learning Management System (Folio).

I DO NOT ACCEPT LATE ASSIGNMENTS. NO EXCEPTIONS, NO EXCUSES. A late assignment is any work that is not turned in during the class period in which it is due. This means that you must anticipate any problems that will occur. In other words, a computer / printer / drive / car / arm being broken at the last minute is not an excuse. To avoid last-minute catastrophes (which always occur), DO NOT WAIT UNTIL THE LAST MINUTE TO DO YOUR WORK.

Accessibility Accommodation

In compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), this course will honor requests for reasonable accommodations made by individuals with disabilities or demonstrating appropriate need for learning environment adjustments. Students must self-disclose their disability to the Student Accessibility Resource Center (SARC) before academic accommodations can be implemented.

For additional information, please call the SARC office at (912) 478-1566 on the Statesboro campus, or at (912) 344-2572 on the Armstrong and Liberty campuses.

Contingencies

Since we're an online asynchronous class, we're not really affected by things like the institution shutting down, so I'll skip right to more individual matters.

If you are under quarantine:
I can't grant you any extensions to your deadlines unless I receive a report from the GS CARES Team about your status. You can't just email me to say that you think you might have a virus and are self-isolating in order to minimize the chance of infecting others. That means that if you think you might have been exposed, or if you have tested positive, you must complete a COVID-19 Health Reporting Form, which can be found in the COVID-19 Information & Resources section of your MyGeorgiaSouthern page.

If you do have a CARES report and can't work on the class, it'll be like this class did not exist for you during your illness. If a paper is due during your quarantine, you'll have an extension until you return to class. If you miss either exam, we'll work that out on a case-by-case basis.

WRITING ASSIGNMENTS

Writing Assignment 1

Culture consists of shared values, beliefs, knowledge, skills, and practices that underpin behavior by members of a social group at a particular point in time. Literary works that have significance for a culture either reinforce or question the core principles and ideas which a society or culture thinks are important.

For this assignment, choose one of the works we have studied, and discuss the meaning, cultural significance, and ethical implications of that text for its original audience and for us today. You can complete this assignment in one of three ways:

1. Write a 500-word essay on the topic.
2. Create a slideshow presentation using the software of your choice and record yourself presenting it (your presentation should take no less than 10 minutes to present).
3. Create an infographic that addresses the culture you're focusing on, the value or values you're presenting, and explains at least three textual sites where you see this value or values represented.

In this first essay, you can write on either Candide, Life of a Sensuous Woman, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, "Punishment," or the poetry of Blake, Keats, Whitman, or Yeats.

What's really being asked of you

Let's take a look at what you have to address in this essay. There are six areas you need to consider:

Original audience for the work	Current audience for the work
1. Meaning	2. Meaning
3. Cultural significance	4. Cultural significance
5. Ethical implications	6. Ethical implications

You should be able to rely heavily on the background information for each historical period ("Introduction to the Enlightenment," "The Floating World," "Introduction to Romanticism") to help you consider how the original audiences for these works would have received them. But think long and hard about this, because sometimes what looks like the obvious answer isn't the correct one.

This should be formatted properly (see the MLA 9 material in Folio for directions about how to do this. If you don't get the formatting correct the first time, I'll return your paper to you, and you'll have to use your one revision to get the formatting right. That means you'll be losing the opportunity to revise your paper for a higher score (see below). So it would definitely pay to get it right the first time.

Writing Assignment 2

Culture consists of shared values, beliefs, knowledge, skills, and practices that underpin behavior by members of a social group at a particular point in time. Literary works that have significance for a culture either reinforce or question the core principles and ideas which a society or culture thinks are important.

For this assignment, choose one of the works we have studied, and discuss the meaning, cultural significance, and ethical implications of that text for its original audience and for us today. You can complete this assignment in one of three ways:

1. Write a 500-word essay on the topic.
2. Create a slideshow presentation using the software of your choice and record yourself presenting it (your presentation should take no less than 10 minutes to present).
3. Create an infographic that addresses the culture you're focusing on, the value or values you're presenting, and explains at least three textual sites where you see this value or values represented.

In this second essay, you can write on either "This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen," "Death Constant Beyond Love," Zaabalawi," Death and the King's Horseman," or the poetry of Eliot, Akhmatova, Senghor, Walcott, or Heaney.

What's really being asked of you

Let's take a look at what you have to address in this essay. There are six areas you need to consider:

Original audience for the work	Current audience for the work
1. Meaning	2. Meaning
3. Cultural significance	4. Cultural significance
5. Ethical implications	6. Ethical implications

You should be able to rely heavily on the background information for each historical period ("Introduction to Modernism," "Negritude," "Introduction to Existentialism," "Post-WWII Culture") to help you consider how the original audiences for these works would have received them. But think long and hard about this, because sometimes what looks like the obvious answer isn't the correct one.

This should be formatted properly (see the MLA 9 material in Folio for directions about how to do this. If you don't get the formatting correct the first time, I'll return your paper to you, and you'll have to use your one revision to get the formatting right. That means you'll be losing the opportunity to revise your paper for a higher score (see below). So it would definitely pay to get it right the first time.

GRADING

My Grading Process

When I mark your papers, here's my process: I read your papers at least three times. The first time, I just go through them looking for your argument and if you addressed the prompt in your essay. In my next reading, I apply the following Minimum Standards Rubric, which comes from the Technical College system in South Carolina. This rubric is applied to papers from students at two-year schools, and it defines the minimum acceptable standards there. Once I've applied the Minimum Standards Rubric, I then read through your paper again, asking the questions here and evaluating it with the Essay Rubric below. This reading is where I mark your paper.

Questions I ask while grading

For each sentence in your paper, I ask the following questions:

1. What are you saying?
   At a basic level, I’m trying to decode the meaning of each sentence. If I cannot understand what you’re trying to say, everything that follows is problematic. If your sentence is confused, convoluted, or contradictory, you make it difficult, or even impossible, for me to answer this basic question.
2. Is what you’re saying accurate?
   Does this sentence demonstrate that you understand the text or the critic you’re addressing? For instance, if you’re summarizing someone else’s argument, I need to assess if you’re being true to the original author's intent. In your response, I’m assessing your evidence and examples.
3. Is what you’re saying well-expressed grammatically and mechanically?
   This assumes that your grammar and mechanics aren’t so bad that I’ve been stymied back up at Question #1.
4. Does your writing have appropriate flow?
   Does each idea link up with the one before it and the one following it in a way that meets audience needs, attitudes, and knowledge?

If I can answer all four of these questions positively for every sentence, you’re doing well. But when the answer is no, complications ensue. If I can’t understand what you’re saying, I have no way to engage with your ideas, and so I have additional questions.:

• Do you not understand the original text you’re addressing?
• Do you understand the original text, but your writing leaves a gap between that understanding and what is written on the page?

Minimum Standards Rubric

This is the first rubric your papers must pass in order to be evaluated through the Essay Rubric. Since it was designed for students at a two-year technical college that grants only Associates degrees, and you're attending a university for a Bachelor's degree, you are more than capable of satisfying the requirements of this rubric. However, if your paper doesn't meet these minimum standards, you'll fail the assignment.

Writing Assignment Rubric

Your essays for this class will be evaluated according to this rubric:

ENGL 2100 WRITING ASSIGNMENT RUBRIC
GRADE	CONTENT	FORM
A	All elements of the paper clearly contribute to the writer’s purpose, which is maintained throughout the paper and appropriate for the assignment. The writer addresses the appropriate topic and goes beyond the assignment by significantly developing each aspect of the requirements. Collectively, the ¶ topics offer compelling support which clearly advances the argument of the paper. Compelling details provide supporting statements, credible evidence, or the examples necessary to explain or persuade effectively. All points are supported by a sufficient number of details.	Level of discourse is consistent and addresses the appropriate audience; the paper keenly and accurately anticipates the audience’s needs and expectations. All sentences are grammatically and mechanically correct. Each ¶ is unified around an idea that relates to the main idea of the paper. All ¶s support the main idea, are thoroughly developed, and are ordered logically. Sentences vary in complexity, length, and variety when appropriate, with an appropriate degree of complexity for the audience and purpose. Word choice is consistently varied, accurate, and rich, and reflects a nuanced grasp of the language appropriate to the audience. Transitional words, phrases, sentences and ¶s smoothly connect the paper’s elements, ideas and/or details, allowing the reader to follow the writer’s points effortlessly. MLA 9 format is used consistently and accurately throughout the paper.
B	The writer’s purpose is present, appropriate for the assignment, and maintained throughout the paper. The writer addresses the appropriate topic and clearly fulfills each aspect of the assignment requirements. Collectively, the ¶ topics offer relevant support which clearly advances the argument of the paper. Details provide supporting statements, credible evidence, or the examples necessary to explain or persuade adequately. All points are developed, but some may need additional details.	Level of discourse is appropriate, but the paper has rare lapses in anticipating the needs of its audience. Rare grammatical and mechanical errors exist but do not affect clarity or readability. ¶s support the main idea of the paper and are ordered logically. ¶s are thoroughly developed, but an occasional ¶ may not be unified around a single idea. Variances in sentence complexity, length, and variety are successfully achieved, although these may be limited. Degree of complexity is appropriate for the audience and purpose. Word choice is consistently varied and accurate, and reflects a strong grasp of the language appropriate to the audience. Transitional words, phrases, sentences and ¶s are effective and rarely missing. MLA 9 format is used throughout the paper, with few exceptions.
C	The writer’s purpose is present and appropriate for the assignment, but not all elements clearly contribute to the purpose. The writer addresses the appropriate topic and meets the assignment requirements. Collectively, the ¶ topics offer adequate support for the argument of the paper, but the argument remains unclear or incomplete. Details are related to the elements of the text but inconsistently provide supporting statements, credible evidence, or the examples necessary to explain or persuade adequately. Additional details are needed to develop some points.	Level of discourse is appropriate, but the paper has lapses in anticipating the needs of its audience. A limited variety of grammatical errors exists, and may occasionally affect clarity and readability. ¶s are related to the main idea of the paper, but a limited number may be misplaced or include more than one idea. ¶s are adequately developed. Sentence length and variety is limited, but complex structures are attempted with some success. Any fragments are used intentionally for effect. Word choice is generally accurate, but reflects a partial or inconsistent grasp of the language appropriate to the audience. Transitional words, phrases, sentences and ¶s appear throughout the paper, but additional and appropriate connectors would enhance the flow. MLA 9 format is used, with multiple lapses.
D	The writer presents multiple conflicting purposes, or the purpose is inappropriate for the assignment / prompt. The writer addresses the appropriate topic but only superficially addresses the assignment requirements. Collectively, the ¶ topics offer apparent support for the argument of the paper, but the argument is weak. Details are loosely related to the elements of the text. Many do not provide supporting statements, credible evidence, or the examples necessary to explain or persuade adequately. Additional details are needed to develop most points.	Level of discourse is confused, or the paper addresses the audience on an inappropriate level. A variety of grammatical errors appears throughout the paper, possibly affecting clarity and readability. ¶s are attempted, but breaks or ¶s may be misplaced. Several ¶s are not adequately developed, include multiple ideas, or ideas that are unrelated to the main idea of the ¶. Sentence structure is typically simplistic, and complex structures are attempted with little success. Several sentences are unintentionally fused, run-ons, or fragments. Word choice is vague, limited, or repetitive, reflecting a weak grasp of the language appropriate to the audience. Transitional words, phrases, sentences and ¶s are attempted, but are often ineffective. MLA 9 format is attempted but inaccurate, or multiple style guidelines are mixed.
F	The writer’s purpose is not evident in the paper. The writer is off topic and/or omits most or all of the assignment requirements. The connection of the ¶ topics to the main idea of the paper is weak, leaving the argument unclear. Details are superficial or do not develop the elements of the text. Virtually no details are present.	Level of discourse is inappropriate for the audience, or the intended audience is unclear. Most sentences exhibit multiple grammatical and mechanical errors, negatively affecting clarity and readability. There are no ¶ breaks, or ¶s are not adequately developed. Ideas presented may be unrelated to the main idea of the paper and/or be presented illogically. Sentence structure is simple and repetitive. Complex structures are uniformly unsuccessful. Many sentences are unintentionally fused, run-ons, or fragments. Word choice is consistently inaccurate or inappropriate to the audience; many words are notably misused. Transitional words, phrases, sentences and ¶s are absent, or, if attempted, are ineffective. MLA 9 format is not attempted.

Discussion Post Rubric

Your contributions to the class discussions will be graded according to this rubric:

Very Good 10 Points	Satisfactory 8 Points	Needs Work 6 Points	Unsatisfactory 0 Points
Entries are in complete sentences or paragraphs.	Entries are in complete sentences or paragraphs.	Entries are in complete sentences or paragraphs.	Entries are not in complete sentences or paragraphs.
Entry distinguishes between your thoughts and the thoughts of others,	Entry distinguishes between your thoughts and the thoughts of others,	Entry distinguishes between your thoughts and the thoughts of others,	Entry does not distinguish between your thoughts and the thoughts of others.
AND	AND	BUT
is predominantly made up of your own thoughts,	is predominantly made up of your own thoughts.	is predominantly made up of the thoughts of others.
WHILE
the thoughts of others are used to support your ideas.
3 entries (primary and two secondary) are posted in the discussion board area,	2 entries (primary and secondary) are posted in the discussion board area,	2 entries (primary and secondary) are posted in the discussion board area,	Fewer than 2 entries are posted in the discussion board area.
AND	AND	HOWEVER
750 or more words total are posted (500+ for primary, 250+ for secondary).	500-750 words total are posted (500+ for primary).	Each entry is posted but is brief (less than three sentences).
PLUS (a or b)	PLUS (a or b)	OR
(a) Each entry contains thoughtful, substantive ideas concerning the assignment or content related to it.	(a) Each entry contains thoughtful, substantive ideas concerning the assignment or content related to it.	(a) Each entry has little in the way of thoughtful, substantive ideas concerning the assignment or content related to it.
OR	OR	OR
(b) Your entries are responsive to two peers, with detailed remarks about their writing or discussion response.	(b) Your entries are responsive to one peer, with detailed remarks about his or her writing or discussion response.	(b) No entries respond to your peers, or your response to a peer is just a personal remark, not a substantive reply (e.g., "Good. I really liked your comment.").
PLUS (c or d)
(c) Your primary entry includes an outside resource, or a relevant, specific real-life application.
OR
(d) Your responses to your peers clearly indicate your position on what they posted (e.g., agreeing, disagreeing, adding to, modifying, extending or questioning), all while explaining yourself thoroughly.

Plagiarism in the Forums

The material from the Student Code of Conduct outlined above applies also to your work in the discussion forums. Don't cut and paste from another site. Don't alter every fifth or sixth word from another site and claim the work as your own. Don't attempt to hide the fact that you're using someone else's ideas. There's nothing wrong with using other sites, other critics, or other commentaries on the texts, as long as you give them credit.

Marks on your papers

When I return your papers to you, they'll have marks on them, but almost no comments. Only in very rare cases, where errors aren’t immediately obvious, will I write a short comment. For the most part, your errors or issues are highlighted or underlined and marked with a letter representing one of four categories:

MARK	EXPLANATION
A ARGUMENT	These are errors or issues with the points you’re trying to make. They could be inconsistencies, the use of quotations that don’t do what you need them to do, fundamental contradictions in your macro structure, or a number of other things concerning how you’re moving your argument forward.
C CLARITY	Usually sentence-level matters where you either need to be more clear and specific, explain yourself better, or resolve a contradiction.
F FORMAT	You should use MLA 9 formatting for your paper. You'll follow it to set up how your paper looks on the page (your header, your margins, your page numbering) and how you handle things like titles of works, using quotations in your text, and creating a Works Cited page. You have The English Major’s MLA 9 Formatting Cheat Sheet available to you in Folio. Note: “I used an online citation generator” is one of the most damning criticisms of your own abilities you can offer. If I suggested you weren’t capable of looking up and following a simple set of discipline-specific rules, you would be offended at my assumptions about your capabilities. So why would you admit that about yourself? None, and I mean, not.a.single.one. of those generators—I don't care if it's from some online service, or from the Purdue OWL, or from our own library—is accurate, especially when you get into quoting something from an online database, or from a text that I've made available to you. So don't give in to the temptation to use them, especially since most of them require you to type in the information needed for a citation anyways.
M MECHANICS	Errors in sentence construction, usage, punctuation, spelling, etc. In general, there’s a reason why English has at least 64 different prepositions: they all mean something different. Oh, and burn your thesauruses. Using an elevated word that you think you might know the meaning of works doubly against you: it could be the wrong word for the situation, and it’s not the clear and concise word, which is what you want. These are the errors that the Minimum Standards Rubric above addresses. If you can't get the mechanics right, nobody is going to understand what you've written.

Revising Your Papers (some good news)

Once I've returned your paper to you with my marks on it, you'll have a chance to revise that paper for a higher score. No matter the grade marked on your original submission, you can revise it for an additional 10 points (that's a full letter grade). And yes, you can score above 100 on your revision.

If you'd like to do that, you'll have one week after I return your papers to do the following:

1. In a separate document, do the following for each error:
   1. Copy it from your paper as you wrote it, then explain what's wrong with it, or why it's incorrect.
   2. Rewrite the text in question, correcting the error.
   The mark on that error (the A, C, F, or M) will be your initial guide to figuring this out. If you truly can't get it on your own, I can let you know more specifically what the error is. I can't do that for every error, because part of this exercise is your practice in reading your own work, but if you have questions about one or two, let me know.


2. Revise your paper, correcting EVERY error.


3. Submit the following to the same dropbox where you submitted your paper:
   • The document you produced listing and explaining the errors.
   • The revised version of your paper.

EVALUATION