| English 705 Assignments Reading Responses guidelines and grading criteria |
| On a regular basis, you will
be required to write short essays in response to the readings. These
will be semi-formal documents (about 500-700 words) written in response
to readings or discussions. The reading responses are a place for you
to think through ideas, to wallow in complexity. Do not be overly
concerned with grammar or mechanics here (but do proofread); these are
not meant to be written and revised to any point of exhaustion. Save
that for your major project.
I will try to give the class feedback and guidance on these early on, but I will not evaluate and grade each individual one. Instead, I will grade the entire packet of them, which you will put together with a reflective cover memo, near the end of the semester. (See below.) In general, I will evaluate the packet you compile according to content (Does each paper respond to the text or discussion and engage the prompt?), expression (Does the writer work to express clearly [or complexly if not clearly] what he or she is thinking about?), and maturity of thought (To what extent does the writer dig into the materials and/or explore questions and ideas?) I will also consider the rhetorical effectiveness of these, given that their purpose includes helping your classmates to work their way through the materials and concepts; they are thus your primary reading audience, and your writing will be appropriately reader-based according to our context. Finally, if any of these are missing from your packet or were posted after their due date (late posts are accepted but not counted), you will lose 5 points (for each one missing or late) out of the packet's total of 25. Please, please do each of these, and do them on time. Although I may ask for hardcopies of responses occasionally, most or all will be due as electronic contributions to our Laulima site or Wordpress blogsite (most will be the latter). Keep in mind that such sites dates each posting you make. *PLEASE NOTE: Servers occasionally crash. Keep backup copies of everything you write. If you post an assignment and it disappears, you will be responsible for replacing it. Finally, this: as you write these and post them to our blogsite, also take the extra two minutes to save them in a digital folder on your hard drive. You might even want to print them out, too, since at least one class member's hard drive is bound to crash this semester. Although you will be submitting them online, you will also be responsible for giving me all of them in hardcopy form, together as a packet, near the end of the semester. It is much easier for you to keep track of your one packet than for me to keep track of everyone's as they come in digitally. To see the guidelines for the cover memo and packet, click here. To see the actual RR prompts, click here. |
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page last updated spring 2011
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