For the Sciences
For the Sciences

Introduction

Welcome to 21003: Writing for the Sciences! I am Kevaughn Hunter–you can call me Kevin—and I am your professor. This will be a unique semester for us all. But I hope we learn to communicate well with each other and that I might become a resource for the issues we inevitably face. Communication solves a lot of issues. Let’s have a lot of it. 

  • Instructor: Kevaughn Hunter (pronounced: kev-awn or just Kevin);
  • Pronouns: he, him
  • Email: khunter@ccny.cuny.edu 
  • Office Hours: NAC 6/222, Monday 3:30 – 4:45
  • Class: NAC 4/220C
  • Need to talk?: Send me a message on Slack, and I will meet on Zoom for anything.

COURSE DESCRIPTION:

Writing for the Sciences’ primary purpose is to help students better understand the principles of reading and writing in the sciences. 210.03 will also give students practice of some of the specific forms and techniques used in scientific disciplines. Students will accomplish this by becoming engaged, analytical readers of scientific papers; translating the material for use by specific public audiences; and working with other scientific writing and by considering and questioning scientific methods, and the epistemology and nature of inquiry. Students will learn that science writing is an act of communicating ideas to those in their field and to the public. A passing grade (not Incomplete) in Engl. 110, FIQWS, or an equivalent will meet the prerequisite requirement.

Required texts for composition section only:  No textbook to buy, or borrow! All supplemental reading materials for the comp section will be open source and posted to the class website. 

PLATFORMS

In order to fully participate in the class activities, you will need to engage with several online platforms:

Blackboard: All work will be collected via Blackboard (and Blackboard is where completed presentations will be stored in our “Weeklies.” 

In addition, announcements will be sent via Blackboard. Please check your email address to make sure that Blackboard has a good address for you.

Slack (recommended, not required): Slack is my go-to for quick communication, and I use it a lot. If you want to contact me quickly, use Slack not email. If you have a quick question that needs a quick answer, use Slack not email. If you have a question over the weekend, use Slack not email. If you need quick answers or resources, email isn’t the best method of communication.  

Slack is also a great way to keep in contact with classmates and writing groups. You can post in the general channel to broadcast your question or ideas to the class, form groups (DMs) to talk to specific people or communicate with me privately (DM). By our first class I will have already sent an email with our specific course invite. 

Course Learning Outcomes:

Over the course of the semester, you will…

  • Acknowledge your and others’ range of linguistic differences as resources, and draw on those resources to develop rhetorical sensibility
  • Enhance strategies for reading, drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessment
  • Negotiate your own writing goals and audience expectations regarding conventions of genre, medium, and rhetorical situation
  • Develop and engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes
  • Engage in genre analysis and multimodal composing to explore effective writing across disciplinary contexts and beyond to include public audiences
  • Formulate and articulate a stance through and in your writing
  • Practice using various library resources, online databases, and the Internet to locate sources appropriate to your writing projects
  • Strengthen your source use practices (including evaluating, integrating, quoting, paraphrasing, summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing, and citing sources)

CLASSROOM POLICIES AND PROCEDURES

My statement on grading: 

In my (researched) opinion, using conventional grading of essays and other work often leads people to think more about acquiring grades than about their writing or learning; to think more about how to please the teacher than about how to effectively communicate a topic that interests you to a specific audience for a specific purpose.

In addition, conventional grading could make you reluctant to take risks with your ideas, writing, and communication styles. It doesn’t allow you to try and fail (without risk), and failure in writing—getting it wrong—is vital to learning how to write better.

Finally, conventional grading models assume that everyone is the same, that every student speaks and writes the same first language, develops at the same rate in the same way, has the same foundational education, and that variation in skills and literacies in the classroom is a bad thing. None of these things are necessarily true.

For these reasons, we use a labor-based grading contract to calculate grades in our classroom.

Don’t worry! You’ll get a lot of assessment and feedback on your writing and other work throughout the semester—both from your peers and from me. Use the assessments (verbal and written) to rethink your ideas and improve your writing and research practices. In short, I encourage you to take risks, possibly fail, and learn from that failure.

I will read everything you write, shape our classroom assessment activities and discussions around your work, and provide resources for self and peer assessment, but my and your peers’ comments on your work (and your steps to correct errors) will be what’s important. I want you to rely on your peers and yourself to build strategies for learning and assessment that function independently of just a final % grade.

That said, I will be the one assigning credit for your work. You can ALWAYS receive full credit for every on-time submission provided you revise the document if requested. If, after a draft, a peer review, and a revision, my evaluation is that your work doesn’t fulfill the requirements of the assignment or that you have not clearly taken those reviews seriously, I’m going to ask you to do another revision.  This will have no negative impact on the credit you can get for the assignment as long as (1) the revision request is honored, (2) its clear you worked to improve based on my or peer comments and (3) the final document fulfills the requirements of the assignment.

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THE GRADING CONTRACT

All Work/Labor/ Writing needs to meet the following conditions:

Complete and on time-You agree to turn in assignments, writing, or other labor assigned that meet the contract expectations.

Revisions/Drafts: Drafts are an essential aspect of the writing process. When you improve a draft, your job is to revise your thinking or work, to reshape, extend, complicate, or substantially clarify your idea—or relate your ideas to new things. You won’t just correct or touch up. When asked to do a full revision, the revision must respond to or consider seriously my assessment and/or peer assessments in order to receive credit for the assignment.

Copy editing: When submitting the final draft, your work must be well copy edited—that is, you spend significant time in your labor process to look at spelling and grammar. It’s fine to seek my help or peer help in copy editing.

In addition to the Work/Labor and writing, there are attendance, lateness, and participation expectations that need to be met:

Attendance and participation: You agree to attend and fully participate in at least 86% (23 out of 27) of our scheduled classes, and their activities. That means you must be present during those classes as most class activities can’t be done outside of the class period w/o peer interaction. The allowed absences can be taken for any reason—illness, tiredness, crankiness, busyness…. whatever. I suggest you let me know if you’ll be absent so I can keep you informed, but that’s not required. Your fifth absence will result in a five-point deduction from your overall score. At six absences, an additional 5 points will be deducted from your overall grade and we’ll need to have a conversation about what’s going on with your attendance. I’m really chill. Simply give me communication and a lot of things will be fine, even with these above rules. Let me know what’s happening and we can work around a lot of issues. I can help proactively but will not help retroactively.

***Documented illness will be considered independently of the above policy, as long as you provide written documentation as proof of illness and/or alert me ahead of time that classes will be missed. 

Lateness: You agree to come on time to class sessions. Arriving a few minutes late a couple of times or very late once is understandable. Arriving late often, however, will have a negative impact on your final grade. After three late arrivals, lateness will be counted as absence (each late arrival will be .5 absence once its over 3 minutes late) and follow the rules in the attendance and participation policy (above). If there’s a reason that you’re arriving late regularly, please let me know right away. I know that there are some people that have obligations or commutes that make mornings difficult. If you have a solid reason, I’ll work with you (…but “the subway” only works a couple times, so heads up). 

Sharing and Collaboration: You agree to work cooperatively and carry your own weight during all group work. This includes peer review and all class activities. This may be the easiest of all the course expectations, but we should have some discussions on what we expect from each other.