ENG 2100: Writing 1

Writing Futures | Baruch College | Spring 2024

Section: JMWB (14810)

Date/Time: MW 12:25 – 2:05pm

Location: A – 17 Lex 311

Professor: Zach Muhlbauer, Dept. of English

Email: [email protected]

Office Hours: Wed 3-5pm (7th Floor, Room VC 240)

Course Essentials

Check #announcements in Discord for important updates, course materials, & homework reminders

Review the syllabus to learn about course details, expectation, policies, and academic support resources

Bookmark the schedule for quick access to course readings and assignments (PDFs via Discord)

Use this scheduling link to book one-on-one conference with me during my office hours (Wed, 3-5pm)

Course Description

In this course, the first required writing course at Baruch, you will develop your ability to read, write, and think critically. One of the most important abilities you’ll develop over the course of your studies (and hopefully throughout your life) is the ability to discern how the way we think is shaped by language and other semiotic codes such as sound and images. This course will ask that you think critically about the arguments of others and in turn develop and communicate your own ideas and arguments.

For the theme of our course, we will explore the changing landscape of our now-mature digital age, drawing close attention to the writing and literacy technologies at the heart of its unfolding history. With this in mind, we will closely consider how writing serves as a technology for inscribing individual and collective memory, for knowledge production and distribution, for the making and refining of meaning in all its many shapes and sizes. If indeed language makes worlds, then we will consider how writing technology shapes those worlds in ways seldom visible to the naked eye or conventional wisdom.

Our inquiry will focus on how digital technology transforms literacy, rhetoric, and research, as well as how we work with language more broadly, and often in ways that connect just as much as they divide us. In turn, this involves exploring how the digital remediates traditional literate activities (e.g. reading, writing) into interactive, multimodal genres of communication — from remix practices, to collage work, to data visualization. We will tackle these concerns as a class community and indeed a learning collective, tasked as we are with the need for sensemaking in a connected world of equal parts complexity and potential.

Learning Outcomes

After completing ENG 2100 you should be able to:

Compose as a process: Experience writing as a creative way of thinking and generating knowledge and as a process involving multiple drafts, review of your work by members of your discourse community (e.g. instructor and peers), revision, and editing, reinforced by reflecting on your writing process in metacognitive ways.

Compose with an awareness of how intersectional identity, social conventions, and rhetorical situations shape writing: Demonstrate in your writing an awareness of how personal experience, our discourse communities, social conventions, and rhetorical considerations of audience, purpose, genre, and medium shape how and what we write.

Read and analyze texts critically: Analyze and interpret key ideas in various discursive genres (e.g. essays, news articles, speeches, documentaries, plays, poems, short stories), with careful attention to the role of rhetorical conventions such as style, trope, genre, audience, and purpose.

Identify and engage with credible sources and multiple perspectives in your writing: Identify sources of information and evidence credible to your audience; incorporate multiple perspectives in your writing by summarizing, interpreting, critiquing, and synthesizing the arguments of others; and avoid plagiarism by ethically acknowledging the work of others when used in your writing, using a citation style appropriate to your audience and purpose.

Use conventions appropriate to audience, genre, and purpose: Adapt writing and composing conventions (including your style, content, organization, document design, word choice, syntax, citation style, sentence structure, and grammar) to your rhetorical context.

Assignments

Writing Projects (70%)

• • • Literacy Narrative (20%)
    • Rhetorical Analysis (20%)
    • Researched Argument (30%)

Writing Activities (20%)

• • • Hypothesis Annotations (15%)
    • Blog Posts (15%)

Course Policies

Grading

I use a 100% grading scale to assess individual assignments and your final course grade, which correlates with the 1000 total points that you can earn from writing projects and exercises. If you have a question or concern about your grade in the class, please bring it to my attention immediately.

	B+   87-89	C+   77-79	D+   67-69
A   93-100	B     83-86	C     73-76	D     60-66
A-  90-92	B-    80-82	C-    70-72

What I Expect From You

I expect that you will attend each class and complete the assignments due. Learning is a collaborative activity, and I expect that you will be attentive to, engaged with, and respectful of everyone in the class, especially in light of the fact that we’re still in the middle of a global pandemic. We’re all in this together, and I expect that our class this spring will be a source of encouragement rather than distress when it comes to interacting with each other. I ask that we all be respectful of one another and the wonderfully diverse opinions, ethnic backgrounds, gender expressions and sexual orientations, social classes, religious beliefs, and ethnicities among us. In the same spirit, written work in this course should employ inclusive language, which shows that the writer honors the diversity of the human race by not using rhetoric that would universalize one element of humanity to the exclusion of others. For example, use men and women or people instead of the generic man; use they or alternate he and she instead of the generic “he” to represent “all people.”

What You Can Expect From Me

I will treat you with respect and will spend a good deal of time this semester giving you feedback on your writing for your major projects, commensurate to the amount of time you spend on your writing. I will always read and often respond to your annotations and blog posts, keeping note of your intellectual interests as well as your writing habits and styles, all in an effort to offer you the thoughtful feedback that you deserve when responding to your major writing projects.

Written and Verbal Feedback

You will have opportunities to meet with me about each project you’re working on in class and during my office hours every Monday from 3-5pm via Discord or in the English Department. Sign up for a one-on-one conference with this link.

In the first half of the semester, I hold conferences with each student individually during regular class time in my office in lieu of a formal class meeting. It’s important that you make the conference or you will be counted absent for class on that day. If you ever have questions about your grade or progress in the course, or about an assignment you’re working on, please do not hesitate to ask me either by direct messaging, emailing, or scheduling a time to meet with me in office hours.

Late Work

All writing assignments should be submitted prior to the stated deadline. Given the extraordinary time in which we’re living, however, I will be open to granting extensions for longer writing assignments, but only if you email me requesting the extension well ahead of the deadline. I may also request to meet with you during my office hours to bounce around ideas for how to budget your time more efficiently in the future. You should try your absolute best to meet these deadlines, but I understand that certain factors are out of our control this semester and will do my best to be as open and understanding, yet realistic, as I can about these deadlines. Finally, and most importantly, if you feel even the faintest urge to plagiarize, then  please do yourself a favor and reach out to me for help. That’s what I’m here for.

Class Attendance

Attending class means doing the work required rather than coming to campus this spring. Much of the learning in this course happens through your doing the writing and reading assignments each week, showing prepared and ready to discuss your thoughts, engaging wholeheartedly and thoughtfully in group discussions and activities. You’ll be in a group with four-to-five of your peers from our class over this semester, and you will be meeting with me and them on a semi-regular to discuss the course readings and your writing projects. “Attending class,” then, means engaging with me and others in the class through class discussions; producing regular blog posts, annotations, web activities, and day-to-day assignments; and working with your group in various peer-review activities and writing workshops.

Disability and Accommodations

Baruch is committed to making individuals with disabilities full participants in the programs, services, and activities of the college community through compliance with Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990. It is the policy of Baruch that no otherwise qualified individual with a disability will be denied access to any program, service, or activity offered by the university. Individuals with disabilities have a right to request accommodations. If you require any accommodation, please contact the Office of Services for Students with Disabilities at (646) 312-4590, and let me know as soon as you can, ideally during the first two weeks of class. I encourage you to meet with me to co-design accommodations. For additional information check out the Student Disability Services webpage.

Academic Integrity

It is essential that you give credit to sources of any ideas that are not your own. Plagiarism is a serious offense with severe consequences, ranging from an automatic failing grade on the assignment to a failing grade for the course, with your case reported to the Office of the Dean of Students, as is mandated by standard protocol for Academic Dishonesty at Baruch College. Each student is responsible for knowing what constitutes plagiarism and for understanding the college’s policies and procedures for academic dishonesty. This includes writing with an informed awareness of how and whether your use of generative AI tools qualifies as an act of plagiarism and thus a violation of the official college statement on academic dishonesty.

Policy on Generative AI

Allow open GenAI use but require documentation of use and proper citation of GenAI content: Students can use GenAI tools in this class to help with course work and assignments. Helpful uses include brainstorming ideas, creating outlines, editing, and so forth. If you use a GenAI tool, you need to document your use, including the tool you use and when, where, and how in your work process you used it. In certain cases, as part of your documentation, I may ask you to submit any GenAI results you obtained, so you need to keep GenAI-created drafts and logs of your interactions with GenAI tools; failure to provide such documentation may result in a grade reduction in certain instances. I will provide helpful resources for how best to use GenAI to support your learning process and work.

Along with documentation of your GenAI use, you are also required to cite GenAI if you use any GenAI-created content in your work submissions — for example, text or images or graphics generated by GenAI tools. That is, you need to treat GenAI just like other sources such as books, articles, videos, etc. I will provide guidelines for how you need to cite GenAI tools as sources.

Classroom Conduct

A class grounded in democratic forms of discussion and collaboration requires its participants to act in an ongoing manner of respect, care, and generosity. As part of a course dedicated to the theory and practice of rhetorical expression, students are therefore expected to maintain responsible and engaged sense of awareness as to the feelings and values of their peers. If students feel it necessary to address any matter or event in conflict with the ethical code of our course and Baruch College at large, then they should not hesitate to contact me in an effort to represent and resolve their concerns.

Academic Support

Visiting Baruch’s academic support services is correlated with higher grades. I encourage all students in this course to take advantage of these services: visit the tutors at SACC, work with the consultants at the Writing Center and Tools for Clear Speech, and take advantage of office hours! Visit early and often! Early in the semester, I’ll receive a survey that asks me to identify students who might be struggling in class. Those I name will be prompted by an email or text to visit one of our support services. Please respond to those invitations to meet with a tutor or consultant! Students who visit these services do better in their classes than students who don’t. There’s no need to wait for an alert message to get help—you can start working with tutors from the start of the semester. See below for more information:

Writing Center

I encourage you to seek feedback on your writing from professional writing consultants — some of whom also teach first-year writing courses — at Baruch’s Writing Center, which offers free one-to-one in-person, online, as well as small-group workshop writing support to all Baruch students. The Center’s consultants work collaboratively with you to suppose your college writing and English language skills. At any step in the process, they’ll help you become a more confident and versatile writer. I encourage you to schedule your appointment well in advance of when your writing is due. You can schedule an appointment at: https://bc.mywconline.com/. Visit the Writing Center in NVC 8-185 or at the Newman Library Reference Desk, or log on via writingcenter.baruch.cuny.edu to learn more.

Student Academic Consulting Center (SACC)

SACC supports the academic success of undergraduates at Baruch College through small group peer tutoring and other programs, serving students in a wide variety of subjects across the curriculum.

Tools for Clear Speech (TfCS)

TfCS offers a broad range of free tutorial sessions, workshops, and online practice to enhance the oral communication skills of Baruch’s non-native English-speakers and multilingual English-language learners.

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