Readings

In addition to the book we are reading, The Transition to College Writing, your reading material will be texts that you identify as relevant to areas of struggle and improvement that you would like to explore, which will help you analyze your own experience for Paper Topics.

Here are some articles. I will help you find others as you share the topics you'd like to explore:

The World Might Be Better Off Without College for Everyone
The Secret Shame of Middle-Class Americans
What 10,000 Steps Will Really Get You
The Consumerist Church of Fitness Classes
Eat Food. All the Time. Mostly Junk.
Can You Cure Chronic Lateness?
"Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?"
"How to Sleep"
"How Kids Learn Resilience"

Check out these articles related to college and writing: Coming soon! Death to High School English
Office Hours
The Ivy League, Mental Illness, and the Meaning of Life
Spirit Guides
The Rise of the Helicopter Teacher
Why Teach English?
Inescapably, You're Judged By Your Language
The Perfect Essay
In College, Nurturing Matters
My Little Bag of Writing Tricks
Young Minds in Critical Condition
The Streamlined Life
The Value of College: It's Not Just Correlation
College, the Great Unleveler
Class, Cost and College

You are free to choose a significant magazine article or a book (non-fiction or fiction) that has been particularly important to you and that deals with a serious issue that pertains to your life. I will need to approve your choice ahead of time if you do not choose one of the articles below:

• "How America Lost Its Mind"
• "Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?"
• "Why DO Women Bully Each Other at Work?"
• "Innocence Is Irrelevant"
• "The Smartphone Psychiatrist"
• "How the Democrats Lost Their Way on Immigration"
• "What's Wrong With the Democrats?"
• "How to Deal With North Korea"
• "When Your Child Is a Psychopath"
• "My Family's Slave"
• "How to Trick People Into Saving Money"
• "How Online Shopping Makes Suckers of Us All"
• "Alec Baldwin Gets Under Trump's Skin"
• "What Your Therapist Doesn’t Know"
• "Why Is Silicon Valley So Awful to Women?"
• "Containing Trump"
• "How to Build an Autocracy"
• "In Defense of Facts"
• "How to Sleep"
• "My President Was Black"
• "How Casinos Enable Gambling Addicts"
• "China's Great Leap Backward"
• "War Goes Viral"
• "The Binge Breaker"
• "How American Outlawed Adolescence"
• "The World Is a Thriving Slaughterhouse"
• "What O. J. Simpson Means to Me"
• "How Helicopter Parenting Can Cause Binge Drinking"
• "The Original Underclass"
• "Is America Any Safer?"
• "The War on Stupid People"
• "The Republican Party’s White Strategy"
• "How American Politics Went Insane"
• "There's No Such Thing as Free Will"
• "How Kids Learn Resilience"
• "The False Promise of DNA Testing"
• "The Mind of Donald Trump"
• "Payday Lending: Will Anything Better Replace It?"
• "The Secret Shame of Middle-Class Americans"
• "A Free-Market Plan to Save the American West From Drought"
• "The Math Revolution"
• "How America Is Putting Itself Back Together"
• "The Talking Cure"
• "The Virologist"
• "The Big Kill"
• "Revenue Streams"
• "The Obama Brief"
• "The Solace Oblivion"
• "The New Preschool Is Crushing Kids"
• "Can Hobby Lobby Buy the Bible?"
• "Why America Is Moving Left"
• "The Great Republican Revolt"
• "Why Primo Levi Survives"
• "The Equalizer: Bill de Blasio vs. Inequality"
• "Hollywood on the Yellow Sea"
• "The Silicon Valley Suicides"
• "The Exemplary Narcissism of Snoopy"
• "Playing Defense Against the Drones"
• "If You’re Not Paranoid, You’re Crazy"
• "Why I Put My Wife’s Career First"
• "How an 18th-Century Philosopher Helped Solve My Midlife Crisis"
• "Can DNA Evidence Solve a 30-Year-Old Crime?"
• "The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration"
• "The Neoliberal Arts"
• "The Coddling of the American Mind"
• "That's Not Funny!"
• "What If Everything You Knew About Disciplining Kids Was Wrong?"
• "Letter to My Son"
• "Prison Born"
• "A World Without Work"
• "How Indie Rock Changed the World"
• "Why It Pays to Be a Jerk"
• "The Execution of Clayton Lockett"
• "Will Pope Francis Break the Church?"
• "The Man Who Couldn't Stop Giving"
• "Outside Shooter"
• "The Disintegration of the World"
• "Can Bankers Behave?"
• "The Upwardly Mobile Barista"
• "Why Workers Won't Unite"
• "The Science of Near-Death Experiences"
• "The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous"
• "Is It Time for the Jews to Leave Europe?"
• "Should You Bring Your Unborn Baby to Work?"
• "What ISIS Really Wants"
• "Do Human Rights Increase Inequality?"
• "Death Denial"
• "The Celebrity Illusion"
• "The Slow Death of the University"
• "The New Adulthood"
• "Literature and Money"
• "Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe"
• "The Believers"
• "What's Wrong With Public Intellectuals?"
• "The Evolution of Altruism"
• "May You Have My Luck"
• "Why I Miss the Culture Wars"
• "Can the First Amendment Survive the Internet?"
• "The Progressive Case for Reducing Immigration"
• "Teach or Perish"
• "Slavery and Capitalism"
• "Time to Imagine"
• "Is Artificial Intelligence a Threat?"
• "Your Brain on Metaphors"
• "The Shrinking World of Ideas"
• "Speed Kills"
• "The Death of the Artist—and the Birth of the Creative Entrepreneur"
• "5,200 Days in Space"
• "The Tragedy of the American Military"
• "Why God Will Not Die"
• "The Shazam Effect"
• "The Real Roots of Midlife Crisis"
• "China's Dangerous Game"
• "Doctors Tell All—and It's Bad"
• "The Adultery Arms Race"
• "Why Kids Sext"
• "How Gangs Took Over Prisons"
• "What Happens When We All Live to 100?"
• "How to Talk About Climate Change So People Will Listen"
• "The Future of College?"
• "The Law-School Scam"
• "The Soul of the Research University"
• "Seeds of Doubt"
• "The Believers"
• "What Are You Going to Do With That?"
• "What Ails Elite Education?"
• "The Internet of Words"
• "The Uses of Division"
• "Crime Fiction"
• "What is a Woman?""
• "Why Are All the Cartoon Mothers Dead?"
• "Stone Soup"
• "Wrong Answer"
• "The Sex Amendment"
• "One of a Kind"
• "What's So Funny?"
• "Stones and Bones"
• "Secrets of the Creative Brain"
• "Get Out of Jail, Inc."
• "The Disruption Machine"
• "The Miseducation of America"
• "The Teen Whisperer"
• "The Hillary Show"
• "Fire on the Mountain"
• "The Case for Reparations"
• "Rogue Element"
• "Schooled"
• "The End of Food"
• "The Great Extinction"
• "Segregation Now ..."
• "The Confidence Gap"
• "Capital Man"
• "Is Stop-and-Frisk Worth It?"
• "The War on Reason"
• "Sacred and Profane"
• "The Reckoning"
• "A Star in a Bottle"
• "Cheap Words"
• "A Valuable Reputation"
• "A Botched Operation"
• "How to Escape the Community-College Trap"
• "Jesse Willms, the Dark Lord of the Internet"
• "Death Dust"
• "A Mission Gone Wrong"
• "They're Watching You at Work"
• "The Intelligent Plant"
• "The Big Sleep"
• "The Man Who Would Teach Machines to Think"
• "All Can Be Lost: The Risk of Putting Our Knowledge in the Hands of Machines"
• "The Body Electric"
• "Buzzkill"
• "The Boom Towns and Ghost Towns of the New Economy"
• "How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses"
• "Freedom of Information"
• "The Killing Machines"
• "Why Even the Worst Bloggers Are Making Us Smarter"
• "Taken"
• "How Long Can You Wait to Have a Baby?"
• "Home Economics: The Link Between Work-Life Balance and Income Equality"
• "Slow Ideas"
• "The Lyme Wars"
• "The Girl Who Turned to Bone"
• "The Gay Guide to Wedded Bliss"
• "The Prism"
• "What If We Never Run Out of Oil?"
• "Learning to Live With Fossil Fuels"
• "How Not to Die"
• "The Robot Will See You Now"
• "Awakening"
• "The Web's New Monopolists"
• "The Case for More Guns (and More Gun Control)"
• "The Insourcing Boom"
• "The Writing Revolution"
• "Why Kids Should Grade Teachers"
• "Boys on the Side"
• "Why Women Still Can't Have It All"
• "The Perfected Self"

The following magazines have free and interesting reads. If you choose an article that is not on the list above, be sure that it has a similar length and clear it with me first.

• The Atlantic
• Wired Magazine
• The New Yorker
• New York Times Magazine
• Harper's Magazine
• The American Scholar
• Orion Magazine
• "Is Facebook Making Us Lonely"
• "A Million First Dates"
• "The Touch-Screen Generation"
• "How to Stop the Bullies"
• "The Rise and Fall of Charm in American Men"
• "How Junk Food Can End Obesity"
• "Murder by Craigslist"
• "How the NFL Fleeces Taxpayers"
• "The Case Against High-School Sports"
• "My Daughter's Homework Is Killing Me"
• "Inside Google's Driverless Car"
• "Surviving Anxiety"
• "The Dark Power of Fraternities"
• "The Overprotected Kid"
• "Why I Hope to Die at 75"

Reflections

These short writings are meant to help you think about your goals and mindset as a student writer in college. It is not easy being a student, and it is certainly not easy being a student writer! But you are here because you have a goal of success. It's important that you reflect on that goal and how you can reach it.

Here are the reflection writings you will do. Each one has specific instructions for staying on topic. Click each one to access those instructions:

• Email to Dr. H
• My Interests
• My Goals
• Moving Beyond School Writing
• How I Earned an "A" in This Course

Papers

You will write THREE papers this semester:

• Paper 1
• Paper 2
• Annotated Bibliography

Paper Topics

Part of the process of writing a paper is writing a paper topic, a kind of plan for an essay. When you write a topic, you are writing a report about the essay you plan to write. This report will be 200-300 words and contain certain criteria to explain your approach and intention. You will eventually share this document with your classmates, so you must be finished writing your report by the beginning of class when we have a paper topic workshop.

For Paper 1, use this filename: LastName.FirstName.Paper.1.Topic.F19
For Paper 2, use this filename: LastName.FirstName.Paper.2.Topic.F19

For full credit on this assignment, follow these steps (times are guidelines, not requirements). If you find yourself writing quickly and finishing soon, chances are strong that you could think harder and produce better content. Please take this into consideration instead of assuming you cannot do any better:

1. In your shared folder in Google Drive, create a document and name it based on the examples above (2 mins)
2. Brainstorm in your document about incidents and experiences in your life that are relevant to an issue you want to spend time thinking and writing about (15 mins)
3. Write a paragraph in your own voice that follows the contents listed below (30 mins)
4. Proofread your work carefully after writing (10 mins)

When you write a paper topic, you need to be upfront about the following elements:

1. Introduce a recent experience or problem relevant to you that you want to explore (1-2 sentences).
2. State the specific idea you want to explain about this experience or problem (1-2 sentences).
3. Describe the stages that will logically develop your idea (5-6 sentences).
4. Write a thesis statement for the idea you want to explain (1 sentence).
5. Describe how reading your essay will help a particular audience (1-2 sentences).

So, your Paper Topic should include five components, in this order, all in one paragraph (200-300 words):

1. Introduce a recent experience or problem relevant to you that you want to explore.

Instead of starting with a general issue or a summary of your life, announce one particular experience or problem that bears explanation because it is complex and thought provoking.

2. State the specific idea you want to explain about this experience or problem.

Your essay should not cover a list of concerns. In order to analyze your first-hand experience, you need to look at one concern. For example, why is this problem happening, or what do you hope to achieve by overcoming or treating this problem? Focus on one particular concern.

3. Describe the stages that will logically develop your idea.

This step will take up the most of your report because you will describe each stage. The ultimate goal of your paper is to discuss an experience or problem that matters to you. Whatever your topic is, the discussion has to lead the reader through a sequence of stages. When each stage builds on the one before it, you can make a complex discussion.

4. Write a thesis statement for the idea you want to explain.

The thesis statement has to give a reason for some idea that you think is true and want to explain--just be sure that your thesis is about your particular experience or problem, NOT your opinion about how people should live in general.

5. Describe how reading your essay will help a particular audience.

This step allows you to state the relevance of your idea to an audience YOU define. Even if your topic is well-developed, its importance will not automatically be clear, so make sure you identify your audience and offer a reason they might benefit from reading your paper. The relevance of a topic needs to be openly stated in this report. In the actual paper you write, the relevance will NOT be openly stated.

Rough Draft Conferences

For each paper, you will meet with me for 15 minutes to look at your rough draft together. Your rough draft will be due at the time your conference begins. In order to receive full credit on a rough draft, you must come to your conference on time and have a complete rough draft in your Google writing folder for this course.

For regular essays, rough drafts must be complete drafts, so be sure that your rough draft is 1000+ words and has a finished beginning, middle, and end. All of your paragraphs should be written and complete: TWO for the beginning, at least THREE in the middle, and at least ONE at the end. No short paragraphs--all must have developed content. Failure to have a complete draft will result in a "late" assignment, but if your draft is truly complete, you don't need to worry about how "good" it is. It is a rough draft; however, "rough" does not mean "partial"--it just means "first attempt." You can create your document for a paper by opening "1101.Paper.Template" in our Shared Course Documents folder. Once it is open, "make a copy" of it by selecting this option in the File menu. Rename the new copy and place it in your writing folder. You will type your rough draft in this new document. Your draft must be finished by the time of your scheduled rough draft conference.

For Paper 1, use this filename: LastName.FirstName.Paper.1.F19
For Paper 2, use this filename: LastName.FirstName.Paper.2.F19

The annotated bibliography (Paper 3) is different. For practical reasons, we will not do conferences for the AB, and the rough draft for that paper will actually be ONE of your three or four required commentaries you write about one of the articles or book chapters you selected when researching. For the AB rough draft, you need to have your AB Introduction and ONE of commentaries finished; the commentary should be labeled, start with a properly formatted citation for the source, and contain two equal-length paragraphs that TOTAL 200-300 words. The introduction, like your AB Topic, should have three equal-length paragraphs that total 200-300 words. The content of your introduction will be the same as your AB Topic, except for the third part. In the third part, instead of describing what you hope to find, you will describe what you DID find (so far).

For the AB paper, use this filename: LastName.FirstName.AB.F19

Revision and Paper Grades

There is a grade for the Rough Draft, a grade for the Revised Draft, and a grade for the Final Draft, but they are all the same document in Google Drive. You are working through a process and showing me your progress at each point along the way.

After your rough draft conference, you will begin revising your paper in preparation for Peer Responses. In order for a paper to count as a "Revised" draft, you must show evidence that you substantially changed and improved the previous draft from top to bottom. Google Drive has a revision history for each document you store in your writing folder, so I will be able to check to see how much time you put into revision and the extent of your changes. Light editing will not count as completion. To achieve a minimum standard of revision, make sure you do the following:

• Add to and delete from every existing paragraph in big, meaningful ways.
• Add entirely new sentences to each paragraph, especially when deleting existing sentences for containing vague language
• Add entirely new paragraphs to your paper, especially when deleting existing paragraphs for being off topic or generalizing
• Proofread for typos and grammar confusion

If you are not sure how much time to put in, I would estimate about an hour of deleting and typing. There is no exact time requirement, but too little time will sometimes lead to too few changes.

Then, after Peer Responses are done, you will revise your paper in these ways again to make it a "Final" draft. I am putting "final" in quotation marks because there really is never a final final draft. You can always make a paper better, just like you can always make your life better. But the same revision standards apply between Peer Responses and the "Final" draft: substantial change and improvement throughout every paragraph, adding new and better ideas, removing stale, general ones. Meeting these revision standards is how you earn full credit on the "Final" draft.

Those of you who are shooting for an "A" in the course will substantially revise your papers because you know that substantial revision is the only way to get the feedback you need from me in order to do a good job on your final revision of Paper 1 and Paper 2. Most of you will likely be happy with the default "B" grade and will, therefore, not need my feedback after your final draft. Still, you need to put a lot of effort into revision because failure to revise your papers fully and substantially (after your Rough Draft conference AND after Peer Responses) could result in "late" work for being incomplete--too many of those marks can lower your course grade from the default "B" grade.

Here's the basic idea: Revise substantially and you will get full credit on your final draft and earn additional feedback from me that you can use on your revision work for an "A" in the course.

Annotated Bibliography Instructions

For your annotated bibliography, you will develop a debatable research question on an issue in which you are personally invested, look up secondary sources on Galileo or GIL, and write commentaries that explain how an idea from each source raises a factor to consider in the debate. The number of sources you collect depends on the course grade you want. For the default "B" grade, you need three sources. For the "A" grade, you need four sources. And those sources need to be journal articles, book chapters, or long magazine articles. Each source must be of significant length (I would shoot for ten pages or more, but if you are in doubt, you can ask me). Also, one of your sources must come from a physical book that you check out of the library and bring to class.

Steps for Doing the Annotated Bibliography

• For each source, you will write a two-paragraph commentary.
• Before you write any commentaries, you will use Galileo or GIL to find potential sources (not the Internet), but you first need an idea to guide your source selection. Construct a research question that targets your personal interest in a controversial issue. The sources you choose should bring up different factors related to your research question.
• You'll know a source is worth writing a commentary on if it brings up an idea that your debaters need to think about. The connection does not have to be direct--you will not find answers to your question. You need to stay open to connections that are indirect and insightful. Then you use your own intelligence to explain how the author's idea is important to the debate.
• Each commentary will start with a citation of the source (MLA style) and then have exactly two equal-length paragraphs that total 200-300 words.
  
  1. The first paragraph should identify a point that the author makes related to your research question. As you do in ARRs, explain this idea as the author presents it.
  2. The second paragraph should explain how that idea can help the debaters consider your question from a different angle without actually answering it. In other words, what factor does this idea bring to a discussion of your question?
• Above your set of commentaries should be a 200-300 word introduction that includes and explains your research question. How did you arrive at it, why is it important, and what some of the interesting and surprising findings from your sources?

Not including citations, total word count for the "B" Annotated Bibliography is 800-1200 words.
Not including citations, total word count for the "A" Annotated Bibliography is 1000-1500 words.