College Writing: ENGLWRIT 112

Fall Semester 2021

CLASS MEETING TIME: TuTh, 1:00 pm - 2:15 pm
CLASS LOCATION: Wheeler Hall Room B05

INSTRUCTOR Christopher W. Buck

PRONOUNS he/him/his

OFFICE: Online
OFFICE HOURS: Tu, 11:00 am - 1:00 pm

EMAIL: [email protected]
TYPICAL RESPONSE TIME: within 48 hours

CO-RESPONSIBILITY TO KEEP EACH OTHER HEALTHY AND SAFE

“For the health and safety of all members of our campus community, students are expected
to follow all COVID-related policies on campus. At the start of the Fall 2021 semester, there
are two policies in effect that deserve special mention. First, students are required to follow
the COVID-19 Daily Self-checklist. Students who are ill must not attend class, and they will
be offered reasonable accommodations for missed work. Second, students must follow the
masking policy while it remains in effect. Your instructor will remind you to wear a mask
that securely covers your mouth and nose, and direct you to a nearby mask station if you do
not have one. If you are unwilling to mask, you will be asked to leave the class. If you do not
leave the class, the instructor will end the class, and the Dean of Students office will be
informed that you have disrupted class and violated theGuidelines for Classroom Civility
and Respect. Anyone with a mask exemption must provide prior written notice to the
instructor and must maintain at least six feet of distance from faculty and other students at
all times.”(Email from Provost and Massachusetts Society of Professors, August 31, 2021)

A NOTE ON LEARNING DURING A PANDEMIC

The COVID-19 pandemic is far from over. People from many parts of our town, state,
country, and world are still suffering from this public health crisis with minimal support
and resources. We are privileged to be able to gather to learn. May the following practices
guide our work together:

● Practice empathy and patience. Let’s not impose our own reality and day-to-day
life on others whose lives may differ drastically from ours. We are all trying to do the
best we can under these difficult circumstances.
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 ● Stay informed. Let’s keep ourselves educated about the development of the public
health situation and make informed decisions about our personal, social, and
professional lives.
● Communicate early and often. Even when we are socially distancing to help stop
the spread of the virus, let’s remain connected through various modes of
communication. Please reach out if you need anything to support your learning and
own well-being.
● Take care of yourself. Let’s get enough rest, food, exercise, and anything you need
to keep you in good health. If you don’t feel well, let’s explore alternative ways for
you to participate in the course. (inspired by Jason Tham’s tweet from The Chronicle
of Higher Education. Thank you to Dr. Darrell Earnest for sharing.)

COURSE DESCRIPTION
Welcome to College Writing! Englwrit 112 is the only course that satisfies the university’s
CW requirement. As a fundamental part of your General Education at UMass Amherst, this
course emphasizes critical thinking and communication, consideration of plural
perspectives, and self-reflection on one’s learning.
More specifically, the purpose of College Writing is to help you grow and challenge yourself
as a college writer—for academic assignments and also for the writing demands in your
personal, professional, and civic lives. In this course, you’ll examine how writing is a
communicative act that always occurs within a particular context, and you’ll gain practice
writing for different purposes in multiple contexts.

COURSE OBJECTIVES
By writing, reading, and engaging in discussion in this course, you’ll work to improve your
ability to
● write for a variety of purposes, audiences, and contexts;
● identify (and even play with) audience expectations and textual conventions;
● use the writing process, esp. peer review and revision, to re-see and extend your
thinking—thus writing essays in which your thinking evolves,
● rather than essays that defend pre-formed positions;
● develop your ideas through critical thinking, including analysis and synthesis;
● effectively and critically find, use, and cite diverse sources of information;
● copy-edit your formal writing by considering conventional usage alongside your
purpose; and
● develop effective writing processes and strategies to apply beyond the course.

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REQUIRED TEXTS AND MATERIALS
Hoang, Haivan V., et al., editors. Opening Conversations: A Writer’s Reader. Hayden-McNeil
Publishing, 2015. ISBN (print): 9780738080215. ISBN (ebook):
978-1-5339-3240-2.
Lunsford, Andrea A. EasyWriter. 7th ed. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2019. ISBN (print):
9781319149505. ISBN (ebook): 978-1-319-37038-1.
The Student Writing Anthology: This is an open access book through the UMass
Library. Use this link to access this text:
https://openbooks.library.umass.edu/englwrit112anthology/

How to order your books. You can purchase these books through the eCampus Student
Course Materials tool; search for Englwrit 112 on SPIRE to get the direct links. You can
choose between print or ebooks for all three titles. If you search for the books online, look
for them using ISBN numbers to ensure that you’re getting the correct edition. If you need
access to any of the readings, please let me know.

Keep the EasyWriter after this semester. We encourage you to keep the Easy Writer
during your entire undergraduate studies. This is a grammar and citation handbook, which
you’ll likely use for other courses. You may be required to purchase this same book for the
required junior-year writing course in your major.
Charles Moran Best Text Contest & Student Writing Anthology. We encourage you to
think about how your writing for this course can reach readers beyond this class. Please
submit your essays to the Writing Program’s annual Charles Moran Best Text Contest and to
be considered for the Student Writing Anthology. More details at
www.umass.edu/writingprogram/.

CORE BELIEFS AND VALUES THAT DRIVE THE COURSE

In the past (and following more traditional expectations associated with assigning grades),
teachers and institutions have defined the parameters for a student’s success. Students are
“graded” by the ways you met (or didn’t) those expectations. This course challenges social
and academic assumptions about who is “fit” for education.

Because I hope to encourage a very different type of learning, one that supports you in
initiating meaningful projects and taking risks, to putting in the time necessary to change
and grow as a writer, and in finding your own internal motivation for writing and
communicating with others, we will use grading contracts. Grading contracts have been
developed to “level the playing field,” to help each person develop and grow to their fullest
extent—not in competition with others or according to “standards” established by a system
that doesn’t leave enough room for students with different ranges of abilities and strengths.
You all will have an opportunity to earn the grade you desire as you determine how much
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work you want to invest in the course and in your writing and thinking. Part of how we will
track each person’s writing growth is through labor logs, spaces where you record your
reading, writing and learning strategies and document the process and time you invest in
your work.

Labor-Based Grading
● Here is a radical assumption about grades: no matter where you start, if you invest
time and energy in your work, you will improve. Your final grade should reflect the
amount of work you do and energy you invest. If you participate fully, meet labor log
requirements, and complete all projects, you are assured a B+.
● We are all writers working on projects.  We will be invested, interested audiences for
one another’s work and treat all drafts, views (even those with which we don’t
agree) and ideas with respect and consideration.
● You don’t have to like or agree with every task or strategy we try in here; you do
need to give all required in and out of class work good-faith efforts.
● You thrive as a writer when you have a chance to develop your ideas.  These
conditions are best fostered using a process- and labor-based approach to
evaluating writing.  
● We need to listen carefully to one another, both when writing and speaking. Respect
the range of race, gender, sexual, religious, class and other identity categories we
each bring to class and to our writing.
● You will give a meaningful effort to all assigned work. You will produce all required
assignments and participate in most class sessions.
● We’ll consider writing and speaking strategies that work for you and others in any
given rhetorical context--and figure out why.
● Revision is always allowed and encouraged—even after final feedback has been
given.
● A body of work represents your writing ability better than a single assignment.

COURSE GRADES
As noted in the Core Beliefs and Values section, you are assured a B+ if you:
● Complete all four required essays
● Participate in most class activities
● Invest 6 hours/week of in- and out-of-class time that you document in your labor log
● Prepare for and attend class regularly
● Demonstrate respect for the Core Values and Beliefs listed above
To earn higher than a B+:
● Invest time beyond the required 6 hours/week. Use the labor log to document this
time and to summarize the specific work you did.
● Complete one additional project (e.g., photo essay, podcast episode, collection of
poems, op-ed piece, etc.).
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To earn less than a B+:
● Demonstrate disdain of or disregard for the Core Beliefs and Values, class members
or instructor
● Miss or fail to truly engage with one of the required essays or the writer’s portfolio
● Turn in one or more of the major writing assignments excessively late without
clearing it first

COURSE REQUIREMENTS
College Writing has been designed based on the belief that writing is a process and a social
activity, that people learn to write by writing and giving/getting feedback, that writers can
gain more control over their writing by cultivating an awareness of their own processes and
strategies, and that texts written by students in this class community are therefore central
to the course.

WRITER’S DASHBOARD: We get our ideas for writing from everything around us. We
might hear a podcast that makes us think of something, we might see a video on social
media that we want to respond to, or we might hear something in a lecture from another
class that gives us an idea for an essay we are writing for another class. We also get our
ideas for writing by writing, by doing low-stakes, private writing that enables us to
question, explore, and work out our thinking. As a way for us to keep track of the things
that spark ideas for us and the low stakes writing we do, each of us will create a Dashboard
- a digital folder to save things that we find interesting and the low stakes writing that we
will do. As we move through the semester, some weeks you’ll be given specific prompts and
some weeks will be up to you to write or gather something that is of interest to you.
ESSAY ASSIGNMENTS: Students in all sections of College Writing are required to write four
essays (each 1,000-1,250 words); each will go through an extensive writing process, and
each will introduce new challenges.

o INTERACTING WITH TEXTS asks you to develop and write a critical response to
one or more published texts and tailor the response to an academic audience.
o ADDING TO A CONVERSATION asks you to pursue a question that interests you,
engage in effective library research, and communicate what you learned to a more
public audience.
o CIRCULATING THE CONVERSATION asks you to take the research you have done
for “Adding to a Conversation” and remediate this into a digital form for an online
audience.
o WRITER’S STATEMENT asks you to demonstrate your progress toward the course
objectives by writing a self-reflective letter or text.

Process Portfolios. Each essay assignment requires that you engage in a rigorous writing
process. For each essay, you’ll develop and submit a portfolio that includes the following:
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 a. GENERATIVE WRITING to explore ideas and writing options;
b. an INITIAL DRAFT;
c. a substantially REVISED DRAFT, based on feedback from self, peers, me, and others;
d. a further REVISED AND COPY-EDITED FINAL DRAFT; and
e. REFLECTIVE WRITING based on prompts to help you identify effective processes
and writing strategies and choices.

Each activity, including peer review, is meant to help you focus on specific aspects of your
writing; you’ll get teacher feedback once during the drafting stage of all the units. With
certain assignments, we may devote more time to certain stages of the process, and at other
times, we may move more quickly. At least once, we’ll experiment with publishing your text.
To grow as writers, we need to write, reflect, and write some more—thus, each part of the
process is required, and grades will be based on the entire portfolio, not only the final
version of essays. Be sure to save every piece of writing! For each essay, you’ll be given
instructions on what to submit, how, and when.

Writing Community Participation. Creating a community that enables us to grow as

writers depends on each person fulfilling our responsibilities, offering mutual respect, and
being receptive readers of one another’s writing. All students are expected to adhere to the
university’s “Guidelines for Classroom Civility and Respect”:
www.umass.edu/dean_students/codeofconduct/classroomcivility/
Essential learning in this course will happen as you engage in writing-related activities with
peers. Performing well in writing community membership means actively and respectfully
contributing to and seeking to learn from our class community. Note that participation can
take a variety of forms: e.g., asking questions and giving comments during class discussion,
taking notes on behalf of a small group, sharing perspectives in writing with peers.
Writing community responsibilities include the following:
a. ENGAGE RESPECTFULLY WITH OTHERS. Everyone has the right to be addressed
and referred to by the name and pronouns that correspond to their gender identity,
including the use of non-binary pronouns. Students can indicate their
preferred/chosen first name and pronouns on SPIRE, which appear on class rosters.
Please let me know what name and pronouns you prefer if they are not on the roster.
A student’s chosen name and pronouns are to be respected at all times in the
classroom.
b. BE PREPARED TO PARTICIPATE. Being prepared includes, but is not limited to,
actively reading the required texts, doing all in-class and out-of class writings, and
having drafts done on time. Reading texts by other writers, including classmates, will
help you generate ideas, engage in dialogue, and become aware of your writing
choices. In addition to class meetings, you’ll meet individually with me for at least one

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 required student-teacher conference where we’ll discuss more fully your writing and
progress in the course.
c. GIVE CONSTRUCTIVE PEER RESPONSE. Learning to write means learning to be
read by others. In our class, you’ll regularly give and get critical peer response. By
giving constructive feedback and by listening carefully to others, you’ll learn to make
effective global revisions and local edits.
d. PARTICIPATE IN PEER ACTIVITIES, INCL. CLASS DISCUSSION & SMALL GROUP
EXERCISES. Our writing community activities will include discussion among the
entire class as well as small group exercises. These activities are designed to help
you write and reflect on your essay assignments.

COURSE POLICIES
Academic Honesty Policy.
When using ideas, words, and short passages from other people’s writing in your own
writing, you are required to acknowledge the source. Failure to acknowledge the
contribution of others is considered plagiarism, a serious academic offense; fabrication of
sources is another form of academic dishonesty. We’ll discuss the Writing Program’s
Academic Honesty Policy later in the semester, but note that suspect papers (e.g., those
without drafts or works cited pages, papers which make large departures in style from your
other work) may be submitted to Turnitin.com as part of the grading process. Also, see the
university’s policy: www.umass.edu/dean_students/academic_policy.

Attendance Policy
In-class activities are a major part of this class. For each class meeting you will be asked to
write, discuss, and participate in a form of peer response and you must be present to do so.
Students who are consistently engaged with the course and their writing throughout the
entire semester are most successful, which means attending all class meetings,
participating, and keeping up with due dates. We have found that students who miss over
20% of the course (roughly 3 weeks of the semester) have difficulty keeping up, struggle to
earn passing grades on their portfolios, and usually do not pass the course.

The University and the Writing Program recognizes that some absences may be
unavoidable due to religious observations, required participation in athletic events,
disability accommodations etc. The Writing Program follows the University’s policies and
procedures regarding class attendance. I will be giving you more information concerning
attendance and a late policy.

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DIVERSITY & INCLUSION
Indigenous Land Acknowledgement
I would like to begin our course by acknowledging that UMass Amherst campus stands on
Nonotuck land. I would also like to acknowledge our neighboring Indigenous nations: the
Nipmuc and the Wampanoag to the East, the Mohegan and Pequot to the South, the
Mohican to the West, and the Abenaki to the North. This site will be a useful starting point if
you would like to learn more about the Indigenous Heritage Land in the Pioneer Valley area
(https://www.fivecolleges.edu/natam/about-kwinitekw).

Anti-Racism & Anti-Discrimination Practices

I am committed to diversity; creating and maintaining an inclusive community; and
equality in all areas of campus life, including members of marginalized and
underrepresented Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) and the LGBTQIA+
communities. In this class, I will work to promote an anti-discriminatory environment
where everyone feels safe and welcome. I recognize that discrimination can be direct or
indirect and take place at both institutional and personal levels. With this in mind, I believe
that such discrimination is unacceptable, and I am committed to providing equality of
opportunity for all by eliminating any and all discrimination, harassment, bullying, or
victimization. The success of this policy relies on the support and understanding of
everyone in this class. We all have a responsibility not to be offensive to each other, or to
participate in, or condone harassment or discrimination of any kind.

Linguistic Inclusivity
The ability to communicate in multiple languages or varieties of English is a valuable asset.
In this course, you are encouraged to draw on your varied linguistic and cultural resources
to meet your own communication goals. Although we will generally employ English(es),
including Standard Written English (SWE), in class discussion and writing, you may call on
your other languages, dialects, and rhetorical practices at any point in the writing process.
While all students in this course will challenge themselves to become more effective
writers, definitions of effective writing depend on culture, experience, and background.
Therefore, in this class, you’re invited to explore and reflect on your full repertoire of
personal, familial, professional, and academic language skills.

Collaborative Community Correction

If I (or others in this class) happen to fall short of our goals to create a safe and inclusive
learning environment for you, I encourage you to reach out the UMass Student Support
Resources(https://www.umass.edu/counseling/resources/umass-student-support-resour
ces) provided by the Center for Counseling and Psychological Health may be a good place to
start looking for someone to speak to.

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Names & Pronouns
Everyone has the right to be addressed by the name and pronouns that they use for
themselves. I ask you to address me as Chris and note that I use he/him/his pronouns.
You can indicate your chosen first name and pronouns on SPIRE, which appear on class
rosters. I am committed to ensuring that I address you with your chosen name and
pronouns. Please let me know what name and pronouns I should use for you if they are not
on the roster.

Please remember: A student’s chosen name and pronouns are always to be respected in the
classroom. This resource may be helpful if you would like to learn more about personal
pronouns (https://www.umass.edu/stonewall/sites/default/files/pronouns_intro.pdf).

Resources
Office Hours. You’re welcome to come to office hours any time you’d like to discuss
questions or concerns related to this course. If you have a time conflict with my office
hours, please schedule an appointment.
The Writing Center. As an UMass Amherst student, you have access to free one-on-one
writing support from our Writing Center, located in the W. E. B. Du Bois Library. Trained
tutors can work with you in 45-minute sessions to brainstorm, structure a piece of writing,
learn strategies for copyediting, and more. All student writers—whether you love writing,
struggle with writing, or both—are welcome. And remember that you can keep using the
Writing Center throughout your studies at UMass. Make an appointment at
www.umass.edu/writingcenter/, and bring your assignment, notes, and draft.
The Writing Program. Englwrit 111 and 112 are offered by the university’s Writing
Program. Let us know if you have questions: drop by 1323 W.E.B. Dubois Library, call
413.545.0610, or email [email protected].
Office of Disability Services. The Writing Program is committed to making our courses
accessible to all students. Students with disabilities are encouraged to register with the
Office of Disability Services (www.umass.edu/disability/), and, at the start of the semester,
do meet with me about tailoring accommodations identified by ODS to your work in this
course.

Title IX at UMass. The University of Massachusetts Amherst is committed to fostering an

environment in which all members of our campus community are safe from gender
discrimination (including discrimination based on gender identity and expression), sexual
harassment, and sexual violence. Our community expects that all interpersonal
relationships and interactions – especially those of an intimate nature – be grounded upon
mutual respect, open communication, and clear consent. We aspire to be a university
environment that is free of discrimination and sexual violence and we take allegations of
gender discrimination, sexual harassment, sexual violence, dating violence, domestic

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violence, stalking, and other sexual misconduct with the utmost seriousness. The
cornerstones of our processes are fair and prompt investigations, respect for the privacy of
the parties, and commitment to due process. It is our goal that anyone who reports an
experience of gender discrimination, sexual harassment, or other sexual misconduct feels
safe, knows their rights, and is connected to resources and options that will support a safe
collegiate experience. (From the UMass Title IX website: www.umass.edu/titleix/).

As the instructor for this course I have the responsibility to inform you of the resources and
reporting options relevant to reporting an incident of sexual assault, sexual harassment,
relationship violence or stalking.  I will also assist you if you want to connect with any of
these resources/options.

Please go to the Title IX page at www.umass.edu/titleix/ to find more information about

resources and reporting options. If you want to make a report, file a complaint, find out
about available resources and/or academic support, you can contact William Brady, Interim
Title IX Coordinator by email at [email protected] or by phone at (413)
545-3464. 

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