Kevin Brooks, North Dakota State University

English 120 is a course designed to develop your skills as a reader and writer of academic prose. It will introduce you to the different conventions and styles of writing that you will encounter in humanities and social science courses.

Objectives

Enhance your critical reading and thinking skills. Explore, evaluate, and investigate topics of interest to you. Learn to recognize various positions taken on controversial topics. Learn to engage in debates about these issues of importance to you.

Improve your writing skills. Understand the nature of thesis-driven essays; be able to write such essays. Recognize the different conventions and styles of academic writing; learn to be able to write in these various styles.

Meet the minimum requirements for research and documentation, organization, style, and mechanics on all assignments. See Grading Criteria for further details.

Assignments

1. Position statement: What do you see as the most important influences (positive, negative, or both) of one, or multiple, mediums (TV, film, radio, web, book) on society? (no grade)

2. Reading Reports (15) (150)

3. Review and group overview. (100)

4. First drafts (2) (25 points (5 per page))

5. Oral presentations (2) (50 each)

6. Unit Papers (2) and group overviews. (300 X2) (250 + 50)

Research

Recently published

"Remediation, Genre, and Motivation: Key Concepts for Teaching with Weblogs." Into the Blogosphere. Ed. Laura Gurak et al. University of Minnesota, 2004.

"The McLuhan Retrieval Reviewed." Kairos 9.1, 2004.

In-progress

"Changing the Ground of Graduate Education: Wireless Laptops Bring Stability rather than Mobility to Graduate Teaching Assistants." Book chapter.

McLuhan for Compositionists. Book project.