Introduction to English 1C: Course Objectives, Grading, Plagiarism, Critical Reading

English 1C Critical Thinking and Composition Students will:

One. Compose an argumentative essay that shows an ability to support a claim using analysis, elements of argumentation, and integration of primary and secondary sources.

Two. Identify and assess bias, credibility, and relevance in their own arguments and in the arguments of others, including primary and secondary outside sources.

Three. Organize an essay in proper MLA format and will also be technically correct in paragraph composition, sentence structure, grammar, spelling, and usage.

Course Objectives

The student will be able to:   

Read expository prose critically to distinguish between perception and inference, surface and implied meanings, fact and opinion.
Analyze the way arguments are presented in readings and the media.
Demonstrate the ability to organize and develop written arguments and compositions.
Refine writing skills developed in English 1A: focusing a topic, formulating a thesis, providing support, and developing unity and coherence.   
Evaluate the accuracy and cogency of arguments by identifying logical fallacies and drawing inferences from readings and media presentations.   
Formulate and develop arguments and critical theories about issues, argumentative prose, and literary interpretations.

Grading Rubric

Your Final Paper's Thesis: The Difference Between an A and a B Grade

According to the 1C Grading rubric, the A thesis is clear, poses contradictions, qualifications, and limits.

In contrast, a B thesis, while clear, is less ambitious and absent contradictions, qualifications, and limits.

An effective way to elevate a B thesis is to begin with a dependent clause, which you respond to in the independent clause.

Examples

While heinous criminals stir our feelings for retribution, translating that retribution into the death penalty creates so many problems, humanitarian, legal, and democratic, that we are well served, except in the most extreme circumstances, to abolish that barbaric policy.

Despite the lavish praise for HBO's The Sopranos, the show is sodden with cliches, stereotypes, and mindless violence that impede it from rising to the level of "transcendent" TV that it is so often called.

Important

Please remember your final paper is a test of your ability to adhere to the student learning objectives, which are manifest in the grading rubric. Your grade reflects your adherence to those objectives and your preparedness and readiness for higher levels of English. Therefore, English 1C instructors must be precise and consistent in the application of the rubric to your essay. As a test of your writing abilities in 1C, the final paper cannot be rewritten, so be sure to proofread it several times.

How I Grade Your Essays: Grading Rubric

For a detailed examination of how I grade your essays, please look at the El Camino College English 1C Grading Rubric.

A Competent and Exceptional Essay

When I give a paper a B grade, I’m saying that the essay is competent.

By competent, the essay has a solid thesis, is well organized, has adequate paragraph development, has helpful transitions, and uses the right amount of outside sources to support the author’s claims and assertions.

However, the word competent also points to certain derogatory characteristics: The competent essay tends toward cliché, truisms, aphorisms, and familiar, predictable, “safe” territory.

As a result, the competent essay is stale and boring so that the reader feels as if he is slogging through the exposition and is eager to get to the “finish line.”

In contrast, the exceptional essay is an A paper because it has all the characteristics of being precisely what it is called, exceptional:

The exceptional essay has surprises, taking the reader where he didn’t expect to go. “Wow, I never imagined I’d arrive here,” the reader thinks to himself. “Who in the hell wrote this gem,” the reader continues. “I want to know this person. I want to have some of this person’s greatness. My God, the more I think about it, this writer is so much smarter than I am, I think I’m jealous.”

The exceptional essay has the “wow factor” in terms of its intellectual muscle flexing, its complexity, its insights, its ability to grasp contradictions and paradoxes of the human condition, its ability to grasp dichotomies and tug on both ends of those dichotomies with equal rigor.

The exceptional essay has muscular sentence structure with no “steak fat” or filler as it relies on a precise, diverse word choice and is spoken with a powerful, confident voice that makes the essay a pleasure to read.

The exceptional essay does not use sanctimonious, self-regarding, long-winded rhetoric to bore and chafe the reader with the writer’s sense of self-righteous, bombastic rectitude. Rather, when the exceptional essay does dip into the thesaurus of “surprise words,” the words are “perfect for the occasion” or are used with acid-tongued irony.

The exceptional essay does not hide behind a variety of sources because it is too shy to reveal its feeble voice; instead, the exceptional essay relies mostly on the writer’s dominant voice, the Alpha Dog of the exposition, using the research material as “small pack dogs” or assistants to the Alpha Dog.

Policy on Plagiarism

Any attempt to commit fraud, misrepresenting someone else’s writing as your own, including turning in essays from previous semesters, will result in an automatic F grade, zero points, which mathematically, will disqualify you from earning a grade higher than a C for the semester. You will not be allowed to rewrite for a higher grade and because of the breach of trust it will be preferred that you drop the class. I will use turnitin to investigate plagiarism.

Each essay must be submitted to www.turnitin.com where it will be checked for illegal copying/plagiarism.

I cannot give credit for an essay that is not submitted to this site by the deadline.

The process is very simple; if you need help, detailed instructions are available at http://turnitin.com/en_us/training/student-training/student-quickstart-guide

You will need two pieces of information to use the site:

Class ID and Enrollment Password, which I’ll give you first week of class.

Please click on link for plagiarism for video demonstrations.

What Does It Mean When Students Get “Help” on Their Essays?

With students finding new ways to adapt to instructors’ defenses against plagiarism, such as making students submit their typed essays to turnitin.com, more and more students are attempting to beat the system by getting “help” from a variety of sources. “Help” is a loaded word with many meanings, many of which indicate that students are not giving me authentic representations of their writing. While there are many shadings of meaning to the word “help,” I will break it down in its two basic applications:

The tutor proofread your essay for grammar and diction errors, but didn’t explain these errors to you so that essentially you’ve enjoyed a proofreading service without learning anything. In this scenario, if I find grammar errors, in spite of the tutor’s “help,” you sometimes shout at me in self-righteous indignation, “But my tutor promised me there were no mistakes!” Clearly, you don’t know how to identify your own grammar and diction errors. Nor do you understand that your anger is misdirected toward me. However, you still think, erroneously, that you have leverage for a semester A grade. If plagiarism exists on a scale from 0-10, we can call this type of “help” Plagiarism Code 7. The student’s essay evidences that the proofreading service was performed in the absence of any teaching experience for the student; therefore, the essay gets at the very highest a D grade. A lot of students will protest that this isn’t fair. But is it fair for me to give higher grades to students who receive this type of “help” than to those who don’t? What superior learning experience did the former camp of students receive over the latter group? If anything, a certain amount of deception was employed by the “helped” students, so that if anything they should receive a lower grade. What’s the takeaway from all this? If you receive “help,” make sure you actually learn how to identify the grammar mistakes you’ve made.
The second scenario is even worse: A tutor, a friend, or family member “rewrites” your essay, or in a spirit of grand generosity says “the hell with it” and just writes “your” essay from scratch so that it has an elevated prose style superior to that of a college English professor’s writing and worse the essay bears no resemblance to your in-class essays, which are larded with basic verb, grammar, predication, and diction errors. We call this type of “help,” whether it is a major rewrite or an outright manufacturing of an entirely new essay, Plagiarism Code 10. These essays must receive an F grade.

To read critically, we have to do the following:

One. Comprehend the author's purpose and meaning, which is expressed in the claim or thesis

Two. Examine the evidence, if any, that is used

Three. Find emotional appeals, if any, that are used

Four. Identify analogies and comparisons and analyze their legitimacy

Five. Look at the topic sentences to see how the author is building his or her claim

Six. Look for the appeals the author uses be they logic (logos), emotions (pathos), or authority (ethos).

Seven. Is the author's argument diminished by logical fallacies?

Eight. Do you recognize any bias in the essay that diminishes the author's argument?

Nine. Do we bring any prejudice that may compromise our ability to evaluate the argument fairly?