Evaluating a piece of prose is more difficult than, say, evaluating your ability to solve quadratic equations; nevertheless, it appears that evaluation of the quality of the writing is one of the necessary evils attached to nearly any writing class. The quality of a piece of writing is closely related to its effect on its audience; accordingly, you'll get informal feedback from me and from your colleagues in class about how effective your work is. Eventually, however, I'll have to take on the task of assigning a number grade that describes the "quality" of your writing and of your work in the course. My job is to evaluate your work more or less the way an audience would and then, at the end of the semester, determine whether you're ready for 1302.

Remember this important principle: I'm much more interested in how you write at the end of the semester than at the beginning. Your final grade will reflect the level of skill you've reached by the end of the course. Therefore your early grades are important only as indicators of where your prose stands and how it is progressing. It's the level of your prose at the end and on the final that I'm most interested in. I'll be talking a lot more about this as the semester gets underway.

Now, what am I looking for when I grade?

1. First of all, I hope that we can get past traditional "English papers" that are written for no other purpose than for a grade in an English course. They're not that hard to write, but they're not very interesting, either for you or for me. I hope that we can produce work that says something interesting, thoughtful, or provocative to a real audience, and we'll use email and collaboration to produce, in spite of the somewhat artificial setting of a college course, some sense of that real audience. Remember: what you say is just as important as how you say it.
 
2. A good piece of writing needs some sense of structure, generally a beginning, a middle, and an end of some sort. Some people use the classic five-paragraph theme to produce this structure, and if you're comfortable with a structure like that, you may use it in this course, at least at the beginning. However, that approach strikes me as too rigid, and I'm going to encourage you to think of structure somewhat differently, as something that develops from what you're saying and that you use to lead the reader along from idea to idea, which is one of the goals of structure.
 
3. How do we develop structure? One thing we do is put our ideas into paragraphs. Paragraphs can be lengthy...or they can be one word. But if a piece is all one big paragraph, it very likely has a problem. Whatever it takes, use paragraphs to help the reader make sense of things.
 
4. Can the reader understand what you're saying, sentence by sentence? In some respects, sentences are harder to write than paragraphs. Nevertheless, each of your sentences, even read out of context, has to make sense to the reader. Usually this means that you produce no sentence fragments, comma splices, or run-ons (sometimes called fused sentences), though we'll talk about the occasions when it makes sense to use these. Consider reading your sentences aloud, or try them out on an audience.
 
5. What about grammar and spelling? For a lot of people, good writing IS good grammar and good spelling, but I'm not among them. It's considerably more complicated than that. But it's unquestionable that good writers will pay attention to these elements and we'll be doing so in this class.
 
6. Finally, writing has an ineffable quality that involves not only what you're saying but how you say it, your style, your maturity as a writer. And while it's hard to define this as clearly as, say, a comma splice, it nevertheless is a function of good writing, and part of my job is to factor it in to my evaluation of your work.

At the end of the semester, you'll have developed a set of numbers and my job is to translate those numbers into a final estimation of the quality of your work in the course.  Here are the numbers that I'll have to consider at the end of the semester:

1. First, I'll have have six writing grades, the four that we do during the semester and the two grades on the final; but remember that I don't put the same weight on the early ones that I put on the later ones, so these papers do not result in a strict mathematical average...to average them would be unfair to you, since, if you are improving your writing during the semester, ordinarily we would expect your early grades not to be as high as your later ones. In short, at the end of the semester I'm looking for your several best grades (including those on your final) and I use them as indications of the overall level of your writing at that point.
2. Second is your Index, which I talk about elsewhere in this syllabus.  More than anything else, it's a measure of your level of engagement in the course and, to a certain extent, how much you've contributed to it.  It gives me a sense of the extent to which you've absorbed the intellectual experience of the course in terms of things that can't easily be graded.  By way of reminder, if you hope to do well in this course, your Index will be 90 or higher.  But if you're coming to class and doing the work, you don't need to worry about the Index;  it'll take care of itself.
   
3. Your Lab Deficit:  This is a number that you want to be zero.  It comes to me from a report from the One-Hour Lab, and it reflects your attendance and participation in the Lab.  I'm required to take off five points from your final grade for each deficit.  But the good thing is that it's easy to have a Deficit of zero, which is precisely what you want.
   

We'll also be doing other types of writing as well, particularly writing in email and writing short (often single paragraphs) responses to questions about the reading.  How well you do with the responses to the readings will be described in your Index.

Here's the approximate relative weight that I'll put on these various components:
 

Six writing grades (includes final)	=	85%
Index	=	15%

If you withdraw (or I drop you) on or before the final drop date, you'll receive a "W" in the course.

So, how do you make a good grade in this course?  First, remember that a C is a pretty good grade;  it means that you've shown up most of the time and that you've performed most of the work at a basic, minimal level and that you can write in a reasonably competent fashion.

But I hope that you have higher aspirations.  I hope you'll show me your best work in this course, both in your writing and in your participation and in your general enthusiasm for learning.  We use grades to reward that sort of effort.  If you have aspirations for an A or a B in this course (and I hope that you all do), then the first thing to do is to be in class virtually every time and do virtually all the work.  How much work you do will be reflected in your "Index."  At the end of the semester, I'm going to try to give you the best grade that I can justify, given the record of your work.  But I need you to give me the best numbers that you possibly can.  The grades on your papers are important, so make sure they're as high as you can make them.  But also make sure that your Lab Deficit is zero and that your Index is high.  If you aspire to an A or a B, then, of course, your Index is going to be at least 90.

Well, it's a complicated business, and if you have questions after all this, be sure to see me or send an email. Usually when students have complaints about my courses they tend to be about grading and usually it's a result of a misunderstanding about what the grades mean, especially the early ones. Remember: like you, I'm looking for ways to get you to pass, not fail.