Fall 2006 Iowa State University

English 101D /3
Class meets: Tuesday / Thursday 9:30 – 10:50 Ross 312
Office Hours: Tuesday / Thursday 11:00 - 12:30 or by appointment

Instructor: Elena Cotos

307 Ross Hall

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E-mail address: ecotos@iastate.edu

Course description and objectives

The main objective of this course is to help you shape up your written communication
skills in order to become successful writers in your respective academic communities. The
ultimate objective of the course is to help you write a research article of publishable quality.
This course has been designed to help students become acquainted with the
organization and the language conventions used in the academic writing of university disciplines.
The course turns around the way published authors in the disciplines write, the way in which they
inform their audiences of their research methodologies and results, the way in which they
organize the information they want to convey, and the language they use to convey that
information.
The core element in this course is a corpus of published articles from different disciplines
in academia. A linguistic corpus is a collection of language. In this particular case, the register of
this corpus is academic writing, as the corpus is made up of journal articles from different
academic disciplines. The corpus has a lot of articles; some disciplines have more than 200
articles in their section of the corpus. In this way, students will be able to investigate the corpus
looking for patterns and tendencies of published academic writing use that they will analyze and
later try to transfer to their own academic writing. For this purpose, the course has been based
on different research studies that investigated the writing of academic disciplines.
Each part of the research paper (abstract, introduction, method, results, discussion, and
conclusion) will be investigated and analyzed, using excerpts from readings that have been
extracted from research articles that report different conventions and tendencies in the writing of
academic disciplines. Then, students will investigate the corpus of academic articles in their own
disciplines to see if those conventions and linguistics tendencies also appear in the language
used in their disciplinary communities and/or to find different conventions or tendencies which
might have passed unnoticed to researchers analyzing academic genres. The organizational
patterns and the language conventions will be studied and exercised, and students will be able
to write their own research papers, producing different drafts of each section, which will allow
them to work on new versions of the sections in order to improve them.
At the end of the semester students are expected to produce a research article of
publishable quality that conforms to the organizational patterns and language conventions of
their disciplines as reflected by the papers in the corpus.

Required materials:

No book is required for this class. Students will need to keep their work in the computers in the
lab or at home and on a back-up zip disk, CD, or USB.
Course Requirements

1. Attend class and complete the in class activities;

2. Complete the reading assignments;
3. Complete 5 major assignments (introduction, methods, result, discussion/conclusion, and
abstract, and the final paper (with all the sections);
4. Complete several minor assignments (section organization and language conventions for
each of the sections in the research paper);

Evaluation and grading

Attendance and participation 10%

Class assignments 65%
(Exercises = 15%
Response papers 10x5 = 50%)
Final Paper 25%
(Introduction = 5%
Methods = 5%
Results = 5%
Discussion/conclusion = 5%
Abstract = 5%)

Class Policy

Attendance: If students need to miss class, they should notify their instructor. It is students'
responsibility to find out what they miss and to make up this work. If students have more than 3
absences, their grade will be lowered. Also, it is students’ duty when absent to email a classmate
to catch up on what was missed in class.

Assignments: All assignments must be handed in on time for students to receive full credit. All
assignments must be done on computer. Students may use whatever word processing system
they like; free short courses are available through the Computer Center on campus for those
students who would like to improve their skills. For most of the Class assignments, students will
have to submit their documents to the Drop Box and to save a copy of their documents in the
personal folder they create in the server. A hard copy (paper copy) of the Major assignments
must be handed in by their due date.

Plagiarism: Any work students hand in should be the result of their active participation, be
written in their own words, and reflect their understanding of the assignment. Plagiarism or
cheating will result in students’ having to redo the assignment to meet acceptable standards
and a grade no higher than D for the assignment.

Students with disabilities: If students have a disability and require accommodations, they
should contact the instructor early in the semester so that their learning needs may be
appropriately met. Students will need to provide documentation of their disability to the Disability
Resources (DR) office, main floor of the Students Services Building, Room 1076, 4-6624.
Computer facilities: Students may use either of the writing labs in Ross during their free hours.
Students must take into account that regular classes meet in these labs and they will not have
access to the lab during class times, so they should check the schedule outside the labs for this
semester. They may also use the labs in the Durham Center, which have extended hours.
Besides, they are fee to use the many computers located at various places throughout the
campus.