Course Title: English Writing III (Year II), Fall Semester, 2012
Meeting Time: 10:10—12:00am, Tuesday / 9:10—10:00am, Thursday
Instructor: Dr. Kao, Shin-Mei
E-Mail: skao@mail.ncku.edu.tw
Office: #26632 Office Telephone: #52245
Textbooks:
Langan, J. (2011). College writing skills with readings (5th edition). McGraw-Hill
International Edition. (文鶴代理)
Required references:
1. An English-English dictionary. Longman, Oxford, or Collins COBUILD series are
good choices
2. A lexicon, thesaurus, or dictionary of usage.
3. A grammar reference book.
4. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA):
http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/
Design of the course:
This course will be taught be two instructors, Dr. Shin-Mei Kao (Fall semester) and
Dr. Gi-Zen Liu (Spring semester). The textbook will cover the needs of the entire
school year. The plan and schedule for the spring semester will be announced later by
Dr. Liu.
It contains five parts: (1) essay writing, (2) patterns of essay development, (3) special
skills, (4) handbook of sentence skills, (5) and readings for writers. We will use Part
(1) to review the basic structure of academic essays and the process of developing any
writing. We will use Part (2) together with Part (5) to learn several genres of
academic writing. Part (3) and (4) summarizes some practical skills and key grammar
points for writing. These two parts will be introduced together with matching genres.
For each semester, you will write three long papers with full length. The minimum
requirement for the first semester is 600 words), with shorter assignments and in-class
exercises. Each long paper will go through several sessions of peer-review with
revisions and a teacher-student conference before it is submitted as the final. The class
will be divided into small groups for discussing and presenting reading assignments
chosen from the textbook chapters.
Objectives:
In the first semester, we will:
first review the elements of the paragraph: the topic sentence, supporting ideas, unity,
and coherence;
discuss the structure of an essay: the introduction, body, and conclusion;
discuss writing process (Part 1);
learn principles of clear writing (Chaps. 23-28 of Part 4) , referencing and
summarizing (Chaps. 18, 19, 22 of Part 3, and handouts) ; and punctuation (Chaps.
37-40 of Part 4)
write three long papers: essay length summary (handouts and Chap 18 of Part 3);
exemplification (handouts and Chap. 10 of Part 2); definition (Chap 14 of Part 2).
Class requirements for the Fall Semester:
1. Bring a loose-leaf notebook and your English-English dictionary to the class. You
will need both for working out your in-class writing and exercises.
2. Come to the class. You are allowed to miss three classes only in the entire
semester. Missing the class more than three times will result in loosing the
Attendance score (see Evaluation). Absences due to official duties or sickness
will be granted with proper documents.
3. Submit your assignment on time. I will deduct one point every day from the total
of that assignment until you turn in your assignment.
4. Each student will have two conferences with me in this semester.
Evaluation:
1. Attendance and In-class participation: 25%
2. Three long papers: 75% (25 points for each paper)
Rubrics for evaluating the paper:
Content and ideas 30%
Organization 20%
Sentence structures/accuracy 20%
Word choices 20%
Mechanics (spelling, punctuation, capitalization, etc.) 10%