Guidelines for Assignments

Mailing List Discussion

The mailing list discussion is designed to give you the opportunity to discuss the texts and issues of the class at your own pace and in your own way.

How to sign up for the mailing list:

Go to <http://lists.iwu.edu>, click on Sixties, and follow instructions. You may need to confirm your subscription by email, so please check your email immediately afterward.

How the list will be graded:

To give you as much flexibility and freedom as possible, I will grade your list contributions by a contract system.

To get a B or higher, you must fulfill your list contract:

• You must write at least ten substantive, relevant postings over the course of term. Additional postings are welcome (and may raise your grade; see below).
• You should spread out your postings over the course of the term (or at least not get behind on your postings).
• At least half of your postings must engage with previous postings by other students in some substantive way.
• You must write about works by at least six of the following authors: Baraka, Brooks, Herr, Vonnegut, Plath, Atwood, Pynchon.

To get an A, you must fulfill your list contract, as specified above, and your contributions to the list, taken as a whole, must

• maintain a high standard of intellectual rigor, insight, and originality,
• significantly advance the list discussion, and
• help the group get along as a social entity (e.g. by demonstrating respect for the opinions and feelings of others).

Borderline grades (A-, B+) are possible.

If you write more than ten postings, I won't automatically raise your grade, but I will look at your best ten postings as I assess the quality of your contribution.

From these two baseline grades, I will make three kinds of deductions if necessary:

• If you do not write a sufficient number of substantive, relevant postings, or do not write about a sufficient number of authors, I will deduct up to 8 points for each missing posting or author. Writing 5 entries or fewer will merit an automatic F.
• If some of your entries are so insubstantial as to not seem to merit counting, I will deduct as much as 4 points for each insubstantial posting. I will make less severe deductions for multiple entries that are barely substantial enough to count. Conversely, if you have more than your ten entries, but several are quite short, I am willing to combine multiple short entries to count as full entries.
• If you fall significantly behind in your postings (averaging fewer than one posting every two weeks), and especially if clump your postings together in such a way that it seems you did not enter into a genuine discussion but simply got your postings out of the way at the last minute, I will deduct up to 15 points.
• Constructive yet irrelevant postings (social chat, notices of interesting events, etc.) are welcome on the list, but do not count in the contract.

Argument is encouraged; harassment and "flaming" are prohibited.

Quizzes

A number of unannounced reading quizzes will given over the course of the term. Typically, they will be short and relatively easy, designed to determine how carefully you have read the text assigned for that day. They will be graded on a 10 point scale: 9-10 = A, 8 = B, 7 = C, 6 = D, 0-5 = F. Fractional grades are possible (e.g. 8.5). An answer so erroneous or indeterminate that it could have been written by someone who did not read the assignment will merit a 0, whereas an erroneous answer written by someone who clearly had read the entire text would merit at least a 5. An answer written by someone who apparently had read part, but not all, of the assigned reading would merit a score in between 0 and 5.

You may replace a quiz which you missed on account of an absence with a micro-essay on the subject of the quiz you want to replace. These micro-essays should be turned in by email and are due no more than two weeks after the date of the quiz. It is your responsibility to find out whether or not we had a quiz on a day you were absent or late. Make-up microessays should follow the guidelines for the assigned micro-essay, listed below, except that I will not give you a question to answer; you will need to come up with a claim on your own. Your micro-essay must address ideas or passages in the text which we did NOT address in class, or must otherwise convince me that you did read the text and read it carefully (as opposed to merely asking someone what we talked about in class and writing that down). I will apply this rule especially strictly for quizzes on texts which we discuss over the course of more than one class (i.e. the novels).

In addition, you may replace one, but only one, quiz on which you performed badly with a micro-essay on the subject of the quiz. The guidelines above apply, except that you may turn in this micro-essay at any time before the last day of class.

The quizzes will be averaged and the average converted to a 100-point scale for purposes of determining the final grade.

Micro-Essay

The purpose of the micro-essay is to give you praciice in the fundamentals of writing literary criticism: supporting a claim about the meaning of a text using specific quotes as evidence. Follow these guidelines exactly:

• The micro-essay should consist of a single paragraph of no more than one page.
• Begin the essay with a specific claim which is about the meaning of the text and which answers one of the questions given to you (questions will be posted on the web site). Don't waste space with introductory fluff.
• The claim should be argumentative rather than descriptive--that is, it should be a claim which could be disputed (as opposed to a claim which states an unarguable fact).
• Support the claim with specific evidence from the text. Use quotes rather than paraphrases where possible--and even when a paraphrase is necessary (e.g. when your evidence is an event or series of events in the plot rather than a specific passage), try to bolster the paraphrase by including short quoted phrases.
• Be sure that the evidence is presented in a clear, organized fashion. The paragraph should "flow"--that is, every sentence should follow clearly from the sentence before and lead clearly to the sentence after.

An example of a micro-essay can be found here.

Papers

Specific assignments for the two papers will be posted on this web site as the term progresses. The aspects of the paper that I will emphasize in my grading will be included in the assignment sheets.