Describe in one paragraph (approximately 200 words) your experience in English 119 and 120 and the types of writing you regularly do.

In this advanced portfolio-based course students are introduced to the writing conventions in specific disciplines. They analyse academic texts, conduct discipline-specific research, and produce critical writing about the cultural, political, social, economic and/or environmental factors that shape the Bahamian way of life.
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Welcome to English 300!

Week 1: Task 1: Introduce Yourself to the Class
1) Introduce yourself to the class, stating your name and major.
2) Describe in one paragraph (approximately 200 words) your experience in English 119 and 120 and the types of writing you regularly do. How did your writing improve in English 119 and 120? What did you find most valuable in those courses? What did you find most challenging in those courses? What do you like about writing? What don’t you like about writing? It’s okay to be honest.

Due date: Monday, August 30 by 11:59pm

This assignment contributes to your overall reading assignments grade, which will be 20% of your overall grade for the class. There will be approximately 7 reading assignments. Thus, this assignment is worth approximately 3% of your overall grade for the class.
Introduce yourself to the classForum
Week 1: Task 2: Strachan Summary
Read the following excerpt from Dr. Ian Strachan’s book Paradise and Plantation.

Your first reading assignment is a 1.5-2 page double-spaced (450-600 words) summary of the excerpt. Please double space. Please follow the instructions on the summary handout below. In this class, we are using APA style for essay formatting.
Due date: Wednesday, September 1 by 11:59pm.

This assignment contributes to your overall reading assignments grade. In a few days, carefully review the feedback I have put on your paper.

How to Write a Summary handoutFile
Excerpt from Paradise and PlantationURL
Strachan SummaryTurnitin Assignment 2
APA FormatURL
Week 2: Task 1: Watch “Life and Debt”
Please watch the documentary Life and Debt. The piece will also serve as the springboard for your first major paper, the academic essay.
Although the piece is now several years old, many of the issues discussed in the piece are still relevant to the Bahamas today.
Click here to watch the film.

Week 2: Task 2: Finding academic sources
Watch the videos below.
What is a scholarly journal?
Play Video

Watch the following video lectures explaining how to use UB Library resources:
Play Video

Play Video

Play Video

UB LibrariesURL
Google ScholarURL
What is a Scholarly Journal? VideoURL
Using UB Library Resources Video part 1URL
Using UB Library Resources part 2URL
Using Library Resources part 3URL
Weeks 2-4: Academic Essay
Your first major paper in this class is to develop an academic essay that builds off of concepts that come up in Life and Debt. Your essay must deal in some way with one of the topics that comes up in the documentary, even if the topic just comes up in passing, applying the concept to the Bahamas. While I encourage you to come up with other topics (as long as they relate to the documentary in some way), here are some possible approaches:
Unlike in Jamaica, agriculture has not played a major role in the Bahamian economy for the past several decades. Given the current state of the global economy, should the Bahamas focus more on agriculture?
The documentary emphasizes the shallow nature of tourism as a mode of contact between cultures. Are there ways to deepen the tourist’s engagement with a local culture?
Given Jamaica’s negative experience with IMF bailouts, what must the Bahamas do to avoid such negative outcomes?
Remember, the above are just topics/approaches. It is up to you to develop and focus these topics into a specific and unique thesis statement and approach.
For this essay, you must incorporate at least six sources, four of which need to be academic sources. Please use APA style for this essay.
Length: 5 pages (rough draft)
6 pages (final draft)
Before submitting your introductory paragraph with thesis, please test your one sentence thesis statement at www.thesisworkshopper.com and revise the thesis statement according to the feedback from the website. Please keep in mind that this is an experimental website that Dr. Oenbring has developed. Moreover, just because the Thesisworkshopper algorithm didn’t find anything wrong with your thesis doesn’t mean you have a good thesis; it merely means that the website didn’t find any of the things that it looks for (which are common problems in student thesis statements).
This assignment is worth 10% of your overall grade in the class. The introductory paragraph with thesis contributes to your planning assignments grade and is worth 5% of your overall grade in the class.
Due dates:
Introductory paragraph with thesis: Wednesday, September 8 at 11:59pm
Rough draft: Wednesday, September 15 at 11:59pm
Mandatory Zoom Conferences: Between Friday, September 17 and Tuesday, September 21
Please sign up for a conference here by writing your name in a box:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17W26mp026iZlJa0O6w5E1TPLyqQ3BOKUEsrSUX66ROk/edit?usp=sharing
At the exact date and time of your conference, please use this Zoom link: https://univbah.zoom.us/j/7425364844
Final draft: Wednesday, September 22 at 11:59pm

APA Formatting InformationURL
Introductory paragraphTurnitin Assignment 2
Academic EssayTurnitin Assignment 2
Week 5: Comparing Academic Writing Styles
A university is a collection of colleges and schools. There are many different fields of study, called disciplines, in a university. The collective body of forms and beliefs operating in a discipline is called disciplinarity.
Writers need to be familiar with the codes that govern the disciplines. You need to know about disciplinarity because as a student who writes, you must be able to adapt your writing style, not only to the surface forms, but also to the codes, beliefs, and meanings that makes up each discipline. Writing creates dispositions. The conventions, kinds of evidence, habits of thinking, and critical beliefs that are accepted in a particular discipline’s writing (and therefore that get repeated over and over until they become a genre)—these create dispositions. The form and meanings of a particular kind of writing is called a genre. We are all familiar with common genres such as a resume, an essay, a lab report, etc., but remember that genres are deeper than mere surface features. As an outsider, you can’t merely put words into the form of a lab report, for example, and think you’re writing like a scientist. Members of the scientific community would immediately recognize the emptiness of a text that was mere form.
It is important for students to recognize that essay genres that make sense in a history class are different from the essay style accepted in biology. A good essay for your engineering professor will not work for English courses. Being familiar with disciplinarity means understanding your audience, their expectations, and the occasion for your writing—all elements of the rhetorical situation. But beyond this, being aware of disciplinarity allows you to start looking for the deeper beliefs, ways of knowing, ways of doing that are demanded in new writing scenes.
Of course, knowing all the codes to all the different disciplines in the university is an impossible task. But at least you can understand THAT there are different types of academic writing and expect first to have to learn the basic rules for a new discipline when you need to write there. Beyond the mechanics, it is important also for you to understand that conforming to the disciplinary code of a field of study shapes more than the form of your writing: it shapes your thinking, and therefore has social consequences. When you major in one discipline, you start to be indoctrinated into that community’s ways of being. Since each discipline has deep beliefs that socialize members of it, the career decisions your make will affect your language use and thus your knowledge making. It will shape how you make sense out of reality, how you construct your personal identity. Many researchers have conducted studies into the effect that disciplinarity has on the people who are disciplined by whatever field they go into. As Catherine Schryer explains: “Depending on key career decisions, students will be deeply socialized into […] competing traditions” (113). Disciplinary genres have an immense power to shape identity. Genres are not neutral containers, but social forces that carry the cultural and political bearings that first solidified them. In this English course where we learn about writing and academic literacy, it is necessary to acknowledge the implications beneath the surface of disciplinarity.
The nature of disciplinarity is a huge (and sadly, usually invisible) factor in undergraduate education. It’s why I cannot really teach you how to write in the classes you will take in diverse disciplines and the workplaces that are the sites of your future careers. Ha! What’s good writing? As if writing were one monolithic entity!
Humanities (English, literature, philosophy, music, art, drama, cultural studies, etc.)
The humanities is a division of disciplines that originated from a focus on human forms of communication and culture. Traditionally, it was thought to be the best works (texts) that humans could produce, and aesthetic (beauty) and creative qualities were valued for the genius that created them. The earlier view centered their intellectual interests on “high” art, which meant that works of poetry, Shakespeare, painting, etc. were revered as poetic ideals and the creators were superior to the masses of common people, common interests. Today, that view has shifted to an appreciation of the everyday (a characteristic of the postmodern sensibility) and the ordinary. Instead of fine art and high culture, interests of people in the humanities presently are focused on popular texts and discourse used by everyday people. At the center of the humanities discipline is a regard for the human projects of civilization.
It is important to understand that many people in the humanities share an underlying belief about the nature of reality. Because the human element of life has been foremost in the history of this division, humanities scholars favor knowledge that reflects the conditions and uncertainties of life. Many in this field understand the nature of experience and narrative, or stories, that frame different peoples’ diverse understandings of the world. As the authors of one English book put it: “The stories we tell ourselves teach us how to make sense of reality.” Thinkers in the humanities are aware of the power and diversity of one’s point of view, which involves persuasion, classically called rhetoric. Rhetoric, which used to be thought of as “the art of persuasion,” is more appropriately seen as the practices that we all use to communicate and to make meaning. As one scholar puts it, rhetoric becomes the “‘condition of our existence’—a way of being, knowing, organizing, and acting in the world.” Rather than pretend absolute certainty operating in the world, people in the humanities find a worldview to be more honest and credible if it takes into account the differences of meaning and conflicts that arise from diverse human conditions. Theories that value plurality and multiplicity are esteemed as being more thoughtfully considered than theories that don’t (which might be viewed as narrow-minded opinions that fail to consider alternative ways of thinking). For most thinkers in the humanities, the goal of scholarship is less to resolve problems and arrive at some supposed ground that defies further investigation and more to continue the examination so as to keep discovering deeper layers of meaning. They don’t want to come up with the one, right answer because more than one interpretation is always possible. Critical thinking and interpretation backed up by persuasive evidence from the text are the goals.
Essay assignments in humanities classes typically ask writers to make an argument. This has been called “essayistic prose.” Writers make a thesis claim and back it up with support. They try to convince their readers that their idea is worth considering. To be persuasive, the kind of evidence presented meets the expectations of readers who share humanistic values, which means that multiplicity and ambiguity are appreciated as proof of critical thinking. Many of the assignment prompts in humanities classes ask for some kind of interpretation, some kind of critical thinking, some kind of original analysis. Usually this comes in response to some “text” in the broad sense of the word, be it written or cultural (such as a movie, advertisement, etc.). Since this interpretation is a response to the text being analyzed, the process is often called “doing a close reading.” Additionally, there is a focus on what else has been written on the subject—hence the references to textual authority—and placing the essay’s central thesis in and amongst other texts is of prime importance. MLA format is used for citation and documentation.
The organization of the paper reflects its purpose of argument: the introduction sets up and articulates the thesis argument, the body of paragraphs take up subpoints that are some aspect of the subject and each are an element of proof of the argument, and the conclusion is a resolution of why the argument matters. There are no headings between sections (unless the paper is long, 15-20+ pages); instead, smooth and clear wording is used to indicate transitions from one idea to the next. Elaborated arguments are more valid than reductive, short analysis because credible evidence takes the spelled-out and explicit explanation that in-depth thinking demands.
Argument papers are often an original interpretation of something (literature, film, culture, etc.) that the author has to prove by way of analysis. The assertion is expected to be a new critical synthesis, creative, and even a little cutting-edge. Note how different this is from a mere restatement of assigned readings such as might appear in a good essay test. The risk-taking is a result of the critical thinking. Hedging or any wording that softens the direct assertion is frowned upon, so saying “I think the message of the film is …” is inferior to saying “The message of the movie is …” or “I would argue that the message of the film means…” Directness and assertiveness are preferred over vagueness. Not “The media represents romance in a certain way.” (What way? How does it work?) But “The media represents romance in an overly sentimental way that portrays a false view of love, stereotypical views of men and women, and unrealistic endings.” Active voice is usually better than passive voice. Not “Audiences are exposed to hidden implications used by filming industries,” but “The filming industry exposes audiences to hidden implications.”
Since risk-taking is often valued over mechanical correctness, it may mean a grammatically perfect but content-mediocre paper is considered banal and empty. This describes the typical 5-paragraph theme written in high school. One disciplinary difference is to realize that what worked in high school seldom works as college writing. That sometimes means that to get an A on a paper, you have to go above the readings and class discussion. Even if you don’t achieve the most excellent end-product, often you will be rewarded for trying to do that extra level of critical thinking, over someone who wrote a correct but routine and predictable paper. Because surface errors increase when the level of depth and complexity rise, humanities teachers are not as predisposed to worry about surface, mechanical errors as, say, those in business and engineering. A complex argument is valued, and concessions and alternative viewpoints are seen as signs of critical thinking and thoughtful consideration. This kind of writing favors the ambiguity that complexity and further exploration brings.
This is a good time, however, to remember that not all disciplines within any division are the same. In the humanities, for instance, creative writing operates very differently from literary analysis (called literary criticism). Literary criticism uses direct argument to substantiate an interpretation of the meaning of the literature text. In poetry or fiction, of course, good writing is indirect and symbolic, layered with implied meanings and intuitive impressions.
Natural or Physical Science (biology, math, chemistry, statistics, etc.)
Natural, or physical, sciences are casually referred to as the “hard” sciences, not because they are difficult but because they focus on concrete (empirical) subjects. The conventions in the science disciplines portray the traditional view of reality that informs scientific perspectives: the notion of scientific objective truth. This accounts for the stylistic preference of using the passive voice (“The rabbits were injected intravenously” rather than “The scientist injected the rabbit”) and third person (“It is concluded that the rabbit collapsed because of the injection” rather than “I conclude that the rabbit collapsed because of the injection”). Readers expect the writer to efface herself and demonstrate neutrality by removing the subjective position from the observation, by not appearing to be personally invested in the thesis assertions. This kind of writing favors scientific reliability and validity (of course, what is “valid” for the sciences does not seem so valid to scholars in the humanities, who don’t believe scientists can leave their frame of reference, past experiences, and worldview out of their observations).
Papers in the sciences are often not as long as humanities prose essays. They rely more on statistical evidence than humanities papers do. Countable data and quantifiable research methods are preferred. Charts, statistics, and raw data make convincing evidence, which seem to speak for themselves. APA format or other scientific documentation systems are used. Grammatical mistakes or errors in data are highly offensive because accuracy is valued above creativity or critical synthesis. Rather than present the writer’s original interpretation of something, the evidence is based more on research findings or quantifiable data. For this kind of analysis, papers in the sciences often do more of reporting of what authorities in the field have written, with less assertion of the writer’s own new critical synthesis. What makes an obvious and inferior claim in the humanities because it is mere “telling” instead of original argument is to the scientific paper “exposition” of what others have found. Thus, scientific writing can be called “expository prose.”
Scientific reports are a typical science genre, which parallels the scientific method; usually they’re divided into 4-5 sections. Headings are used in the paper itself.
Introduction – includes the exigency of the research and a literature review (brief but relevant summary of what has been written on the topic)
Methods – a detailed explication of the methods you used in your data collection
Results – a presentation of your results (usually including charts and figures)
Discussion – an analysis of the implications of your results (this is the site of authorial interpretation)

Charles Bazerman’s ground-breaking book Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science reveals the force behind the genre of scientific report. Alan Gross and Catherine Schryer also examine the rhetorical nature of this scientific organization. Using such a form has unspoken assumptions that validate the writing by associating it with the culturally dominant view of science as “legitimate knowledge,” objective and neutral. But the order of presentation is anything but neutral: the very organization of scientific writing is itself a framing, an invisible argument for truth value. Language seems to be invisible and the researcher uses words that absent her from her interpretation. To rhetoricians, no set of raw data speaks for itself but has to be interpreted. That interpretation is always already formed by the story frames that shape the rhetoric of science. Alan Gross says that “physical objects and events are at the causal center of the world of science.” Genre scholars note the language moves, such as passive voice and third person, that seem to keep the writer’s story invisible.

Humanities
Sciences
Discourse makes knowledge
Empirical observation discovers knowledge
Interpretation
“Lack” of interpretation
First person okay to add human element as long as the writer does not seem to speak for all, without considering diversity
Third person, agentless passive
Evidentials: “I would argue that…”
Invisible language moves/ physical objects and events have agency
Rhetorical
Organization is itself rhetorical
Reality is plural, keep questions opened up
Reality is controllable, come to resolution
Self-reflective and aware
Self-effacing and “neutral”
Argument
Exposition
Social Science (political science, sociology, psychology, linguistics, communication, etc.)
The social sciences are, as the name implies, partly interested in the social element of human existence and partly dedicated to a scientific perspective. The social sciences aspire to scientific quantification and validity, but since human subjects don’t sit still in test tubes as the objects of physical sciences do, scholarship in the social sciences takes into account the variety of human experiences.
When you look at the writing in the social sciences, you can see a blend of these two perspectives. Often, essays in the scholarly journals rely on more quantifiable data, charts and statistics, and categorical thinking than you find in the scholarship from the humanities. Some of the more traditional essays are more expository than interpretive. But, unlike the physical sciences, there is more prose and less reliance on the rhetoric of objectivity.
Business Writing/Technical Writing
There seems to be as many different kinds of business and technical writing texts as there are disciplinary text types. Technical writing for engineering and the technical sciences entails writing lab reports (including graphs, illustrations, statistics), designing and constructing instruction manuals for physical devices, and multi-media presentations. In business-related writing, there are very specific differences, including communication protocols in business organizations. A lot of material now entails paper-trail protocols and e-mail protocols.
Usually, business/technical writing operates on a “bottom line” and “you” philosophy. As English teachers have tried to make composition students ultimately aware of reader expectations, so business and technical writing teachers foreground the reader’s expectations above all. An “executive summary” of the results for executive decision-makers to read often appears before the body of the main document. The length of business writing is not as elaborated as texts in the humanities who rely on elaboration for credibility: reductive wording is instead privileged for time-saving readability. Correctness is of high value, as is clarity and exactness. Ease of reading and white space is important, with headings, boxes, bullets, and other iconic devices used as visual signs.
Your assignment
For this assignment, you will compare the styles of the academic articles linked to below. Questions to consider:
How does the format of the humanities-style academic article differ from the format of the scientific and social scientific article?
How does the style of the humanities-style academic article differ from the style of the scientific and social scientific article?
How does the language of the humanities-style academic article differ from the language of the scientific and social scientific article? What types of words are used in each? How do the sentences differ?
What types of evidence are used in the humanities-style academic article? What types of evidence are used in the other academic articles?

Due date: Wednesday, September 29 by 11:59pm
Length: 1.5-2 pages

Humanities academic article: Nixon’s “What Racial Hybridity?”File
Social Science academic article: Bethel’s “Economic Impact of Junkanoo in The Bahamas”URL
Science academic article: Kough et al.’s “Efficacy of an Established …”URL
Comparing academic articles assignmentTurnitin Assignment 2
Week 6: Introduction to Discourse Analysis

Please disregard the dates in the video.
Guidelines for Discourse/Genre Analysis
Frame your purposes and questions to limit your focus
Define your collection of texts and collect samples
Study the situation of the genre (the collection of texts)
Setting: In what context or medium does the genre appear? With what other genres does it interact?
Subject: What topics are common to this genre?
Participants: Who writes and reads texts in this genre? What roles do writers and readers perform? What attributes must writers and readers possess? Under what circumstances do they write and read the genre (e.g., in teams, in waiting rooms, on a computer, in a rush, etc.)?
Exigencies: When is the genre used? What purposes does the genre fulfil for the people who use it? What is its accepted social function?
Identify and Describe Patterns in the Genre’s Features
What content is typically included or excluded? How is the content treated? What sorts of examples are used? What counts as evidence (personal testimony, facts, etc.)?
What rhetorical appeals are used? What appeals to logos, pathos, and ethos appear?
In what format are texts of this genre presented? What layout or appearance is common? How long is a typical text in this genre?
What types of sentences do texts in the genre typically use? How long are they? Are they simple or complex, passive or active? Are the sentences varied? Do they share a certain style?
What diction is most common? What types of words are most frequent? Is a type of jargon used? Is slang used? How would you describe a typical writer’s tone?
Analyse what these Patterns Reveal about the Situation and Scene
What do these patterns reveal about the genre, its situation, and the people who use it?
What do participants have to know or believe to understand or appreciate the genre?
Who is invited into the genre, and who is excluded?
What roles for writers and readers does it encourage or discourage?
What can you learn about the actions being performed through the genre by observing its language patterns?
How is the subject of the genre treated? What content is considered most important? What content (topics or details) is ignored?
What values, beliefs, goals, and assumptions are revealed through the genre’s patterns?
What actions does the genre enable? What actions does the genre constrain?
Assignment: Perform a genre/discourse analysis of the genre of obituaries, using the example obituaries. Use the questions above to guide your analysis. Please write approximately 300 words and post to the message board.

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