Informal Writing

For each class meeting, you should do the reading and associated web materials, and prepare a written response on each work for the forum (a paragraph or two) which you will post in the forum for that class (you might like to wordprocess this at home and bring it on your disk to paste into the forum, or you can write directly into the forum before class). When you post, make sure that your "subject line" indicates the direction of your response or presents a question which you are exploring. After you have posted, you should read ALL other postings and respond to several, picking up on key issues and questions and exploring them further. Using supporting quotes from the works is highly recommended!

For this to work well, we need to be on-line discussing these works at roughly the same time, or more specifically, times. It's very important to be able to have immediate response to your ideas so they can be developed further. Therefore, I will be setting up "discussion hours," during the class time (assuming that the graduate students will take that time) and Tuesday and Thursday evening (time? we'll figure that one out), primarily for the teachers in the class. You can join either discussion, however, or both, if you like; in desperate circumstances you can even post and respond in the time between these hours! I hope that the grad students will seriously consider coming to Hibbs 329 so that we CAN actually talk after we have discussed our ideas. The on-line class participation will be graded at the end of each unit, considering both quality of your ideas and quantity, for 30 points of your course grade.
Another form of participation is within your group, where you will post your papers (see below), and critique and review them before revising. This participation will be part of the paper grade.

Formal Writing

The purpose of these papers is twofold--to focus very carefully on at least three works during the semester and to pull all of the class readings together by relating them to an important thesis about American literature.

Author/work Papers
For each unit, you will be assigned one work to focus on at the beginning of the unit--you will be the "designated hitter" when we discuss that work. You should read Internet and library materials on the work in advance, take a lead in the forum, setting up key questions and threads, giving pertinent information. You should also write a review of the forum after it is finished. You submit to me a file on which you have also included all of your reading and response notes, and I will grade that. Each paper/project is 10 points of your grade.

Papers
You will write three documented papers which pull a number of the unit readings together or a set of hypertext notes on a text, one for each unit, and submit it to your group for review. You'll have a little time to revise after the review before you submit it to me for a grade. Details will come later. 10 points each

Exams

You may notice from the syllabus that there are no tests scheduled at this point. That might change (and the overall point spread as well) if the forum contributions are thin and it doesn't seem as if you are reading closely enough. However, as I now plan it, there will be a final exam but no tests (unless you beg me.)