COMP 200-03: Advanced Composition (CRN 217)
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Assignments

Your final grade will be broken into 5 parts: 2 writing units, a grammar and mechanics presentation, the final exam, and in-class and miscellaneous assignments. Each assignment is described below.

Analytical Unit (35%): Your first writing unit will require you to write an analysis of a television advertisement (specific options will be announced in class). You will write two versions of the analysis, culminating in the Final Analysis, which will be submitted with the Self-Evaluation of the unit. Your primary grade for the unit will be based on the Final Analysis; however, you must submit each of the other assignments to pass the unit.

• Description of Advertisement: For this initial writing, you will choose an advertisement from the list on Angel (you may also request to analyze an ad of your choosing) and write a description of that ad (you may not choose an advertisement discussed in class). Your goal for this piece of writing is not to analyze but merely to describe. To that effect, you should consider the following questions as you’re writing your description: What is the product being advertised? What does the ad look like physically? Are there people in the ad? Animals? Other creatures? What is the setting? Can you discern a time period? What happens in the advertisement? What does the ad say? What words are shown? Be as specific as you can as you describe the advertisement. If you are using an ad not linked from Angel, you must give me a link to the video (or a copy of it if it’s not available online). The description should be at least 2-3 pages long. The rough draft of your description is due in class on Wednesday, 3 February, and the final draft is due Friday, 5 February by 5.
• Analysis 1: For this writing, you must write an analysis of your chosen advertisement. This analysis must be an argument about how the ad works (or doesn’t work). Consider the following questions as you’re writing your analysis: How is the ad trying to appeal to customers? What demographic is it appealing to? What specific aspects of the ad demonstrate the target demographic? What emotions is the advertisement trying to evoke? What specific elements of the ad evoke the emotions? What are we supposed to believe about the product based on the advertisement? What, based on the ad, should compel audiences to buy (or support) the product? Does the ad present disclaimers? (either spoken or fine print) How do those disclaimers affect your response to the ad? The more examples from the ad that you can bring in to your analysis, the stronger it will be. The rough draft is due in class Wednesday, 10 February. Final Draft is due Monday, 15 February by 5. The paper should be 4-6 pages long
• Analysis 2: You have two options for Analysis 2: 1) create an entirely new analysis about the same advertisement, or 2) radically revise Analysis 1. If you choose option 1, you need to reconceive how the advertisement is working (i.e. revisit each of the questions above). If you choose option 2, you must do more than change a few sentences and correct your grammar and mechanics. You can consider reorganizing your paper and/or adding additional points or examples to you paper. Rough draft is due in class Friday, 19 February. Final Draft is due Monday, 1 March by 5. The paper should be 4-6 pages long.
• Final Analysis: For the final analysis paper, you will be revising your earlier work once again. If you wrote two different earlier paper, you may choose the stronger of the two to revise and submit or your may scrap that version entirely and submit a new one. Similarly, if you’ve worked with the same paper in two different versions, you may choose the stronger version to revise and submit or you may create a completely new version of your paper. We will meet in a conference the week before this paper is due to discuss your options for the final analysis. The grammar and mechanics policy will be applied to this paper. Final Analysis is due Monday, 8 March by 5, accompanied by your Self-Evaluation.
• Self-Evaluation: The final aspect of the analytical unit that you must complete is a self-evaluation. In this paper, you will examine the unit as a whole. Part of it should be a narrative describing how you chose your topic and how you went about completing the steps of the unit. I want you to pay particular attention to how you developed your argument and how you chose to write your initial analysis and then to either revise or reconceive it. Finally, I want you to discuss your final analysis and why you chose to submit that version. You should discuss what you think are the strengths of the paper and what you think are the weaknesses. In addition, you should talk about how you might have changed the paper if you’d had additional time. The Self-Evaluation is due Monday, 8 March by 5, accompanied by your Final Analysis.

Descriptive Unit (35%): Your second unit will require you to research as aspect of SUCO prior to 1950 and to write several descriptions, culminating in the Final Profile, which will be submitted with the Self-Evaluation of the unit. Your primary grade for the unit will be based on the Final Profile; however, you must submit each of the other assignments to pass the unit.

• Library Foray Paper: On 15 and 17 March, we will meet in the library and Kay Benjamin and Heather Heyduk will show you how to complete research on local topics. Even if you have already been on library tours, you are required to attend these sessions (attendance at them will count toward your In-Class and Miscellaneous grade). You will need to find information about a person, building, organization, or event at SUCO prior to 1950, and you may not use internet sources. Instead, you must find a minimum of 4 sources about your topic (I recommend more than 4 if possible) either in archives or from other print sources in the library (such as the newspapers on microfilm in the Periodicals Room). You may also interview people with knowledge of the topic. I will distribute a list of possible topics as the library sessions approach. Following the library sessions, you will be required to write a narrative in which you describe the process you used to choose your topic and to locate materials about it. In addition, you should describe any materials that you have already found and talk about what additional research you need to complete to gain a full understanding of your topic. This paper, which should be 2-4 pages long, is due on Wednesday, 24 March by 5.
• Profile 1: The second writing in this unit is a profile, a descriptive essay that acts as a thematic description. Using your research as a reference, you will write a structured description of your topic in which you try to capture something elemental, unique about it. Consider the following questions as you create your profile: What is most noticeable about the topic based on the resources you’ve found? What is the one thing people should know about the topic based on the information you’ve discovered? Who was most influenced by the topic? (Students, faculty, community) What effect did the topic have on the community, both campus and local? Your answers to these questions will help to focus your paper. Use your resources to help illustrate your claims about your topic. Be as descriptive as you can in your presentation of the topic. The rough draft is due Monday, 12 April in class, and the final draft is due Friday, 16 April by 5 in my office. Your profile should be between 4 and 6 pages long.
• Profile 2: The second profile is a radical revision of the first profile. There are several ways in which you can approach this revision (and we’ll talk about them in class): you can completely reorganize the essay; you can radically alter your sentence structure (using some of the techniques we discuss from Edit Yourself); you can alter the focus and show a different significance to the topic than you did in the first profile (i.e., if you focused on its importance to the campus, you could shift to its importance to the community). The rough draft for Profile 2 is due Wednesday, 21 April in class, and the final draft is due Monday, 26 April by 5 in my office.
• Final Profile: Your final profile will be a revision of the profile you preferred of the two you submitted (or a third version you think is superior to the first two). Which profile you choose to submit for your final profile is up to you, as is the amount of revision and editing you do to the profile. The grammar and mechanics policy will be applied to this paper. The final profile is due Monday, 3 May by 5 in my office and must be accompanied by the self-evaluation. We will meet in my office to discuss the final profile and your self-evaluation between 5 and 7 May.
• Self-Evaluation: The final aspect of the descriptive unit requires you to assess you own writing. You will have written several descriptive papers by the time you create your final profile and you will have learned about making choices in descriptions, organization, theme, sentence structure, and other elements. Your self-evaluation will be exactly what it sounds like: an evaluation of the choices you made in creating your final profile. In this self-evaluation, which should be 2-4 pages long, you will discuss what specifically makes the final profile your best work for the unit. Elements of your writing that you should talk about include your organization, sentence structure, and focus, but you should also talk about why the revision choices you’ve made benefit the final draft. The revision choices include what you’ve changed as well as what you’ve kept the same. Do not discuss how hard you’ve worked on the paper; it is not relevant to the self-evaluation. Focus instead on the specific content of the essay and what makes it strong. You may (and should) also discuss parts of the essay with which you remain unsatisfied and why that is the case. The self-evaluation is due on Monday, 3 May by 5 in my office and must accompany your final profile. 

Grammar and Mechanics Presentation (10%): You will work with one or two other students in the class to present some aspect of grammar and mechanics to the class. As part of this presentation, you will create a 1-page handout for the class that covers the pertinent points of the grammatical or mechanical issue you’re describing and that shows sample errors and how to fix them. Make sure that you cite any resources you use at the bottom of the handout (use MLA citations). You may, if you choose, project this handout (or a PowerPoint presentation) using the computer station in the class. Presentations should be 10-15 minutes long and will begin on 10 March (see syllabus for all dates). Sign-up for presentation dates and topics will occur on 29 Jan. Topics for presentation can include but are not limited to comma splices, run-ons, fragments, dangling participles, comma usage, punctuating relative clauses, pronoun-antecedent agreement, punctuating subordinate clauses, homonyms, sentence types, colons, semi-colons, restrictive and non-restrictive sentence elements, parallelism, and quote integration. If you have a different topic in mind, feel free to propose it. There will be no overlapping of topics, so have a couple of choices in mind when sign-up day arrives.

Final Exam (10%): On the last day of classes, 10 May, you will submit a clean copy of the essay you think represents your best work for the semester (you are welcome to revise any of the graded work before you submit it). For the final exam, scheduled for Monday, 17 May from 8:00 to 10:30, I will return your paper to you with several passages highlighted. You will be required to do one of two things with each passage: 1) revise it and defend your revision (i.e. explain why it works better in the new form); 2) defend its present form (i.e. explain why you like the way it’s written).

In-Class and Miscellaneous (10%): During the semester we will be reading Edit Yourself and completing in-class writings and discussions. These assignments will be graded, for the most part, based on participation and will count toward this aspect of your final grade. In addition, you may be given the occasional quiz, and the points will count as part of the in-class and miscellaneous grade.

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