English 304
Course Guidelines and Policies
Please read all sections in the table below, as an introduction to the course. Begin with the Welcome section and proceed from there.
The recommended textbook for the
course is:
Harnack, Andrew and Eugene Kleppinger.
2000. Online! A Reference Guide to Using Internet Sources.
E-mail Dr. Miles if you have any questions.
Welcome to English 304 – Business/Professional Writing.
We offer this course electronically through WVU's distance education
initiative, which enables you to take this course at your own time, in your own
place – Anytime, Anyplace.
Distance education provides you with one more possibility for life-long learning, itself an aspect of the continuous quality improvement each of you will need to be pursuing in your professional life.
Be sure to check the online course calendar, print it out, and record important dates and deadlines in your scheduler book.
Please read the next section, How The Course Works.
SPECIAL NOTE TO ALL THOSE TAKING THIS COURSE FROM OTHER CAMPUSES IN THE WEST VIRGINIA SYSTEM AND AT OTHER LOCATIONS THROUGHOUT THE SOUTHEASTERN UNITED STATES, THROUGH THE AUSPICES OF THE SOUTHERN REGION ELECTRONIC CAMPUS:
Welcome to this distance-learning experience. Please read all the material below. The only special thing you need to know now is my mailing address:
Thomas Miles
RR 6 Box 248 VF 159
When you mail in assignments, use a 9 x 12" envelope.
Include in this envelope both
· your assignment and
· a self-addressed stamped 9 x 12" white post office mailer with a pull-tab for sealing.
I will mail your graded assignment back to you.
Good Luck!!
The course is Web-based: all instructional materials are available at this Web site.
Traditional lectures are replaced with course material being archived on the Web site. You never have to worry about missing a lecture or not being a quick-enough note taker to get down all the material.
Traditional class discussion is replaced with the MIX Message Board. You should check this Message Board every day. You can participate in a discussion on a topic, or start a topic question yourself. Continuous discussion on a message board topic is called "threading."
Complementing these innovations is the fact that you will conference, electronically via e-mail, with me on every assignment.
I will answer your eMail within 48 hours, unless I’m out of town on professional business. But I only work FIVE days a week, Monday through Friday, and not on weekends. Therefore, if you send e-mail on Friday, you might not receive a reply until the following Tuesday evening.
The e-mail conferencing means that this course is based on tutorial-style learning, in which you can contact me, your professor, anytime for private academic and intellectual help. This tutorial system is similar to that used throughout the great European universities since the Middle Ages, altered, of course, by the addition of e-mail.
You must take a personal, vigorous initiative for your own learning in this course. I will act as a mentor, but not as a day-to-day monitor of your learning.
This style of learning represents an enormous change from what you've
normally been used to "in school." All the materials are here -- but
you have to have the self-direction to keep track of the calendar, to keep up a
pace of continuous learning, to contact me via eMail, and to keep a record of
what you've done.
Good luck.
There is one recommended text for the course:
Harnack, Andrew and Eugene
Kleppinger. 2000. Online! A Reference Guide to Using Internet Sources.
You MUST have your own e-mail account for this course, and the account must be web-based. E-mail accounts at Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL.com, and WVU’s MIX are all fine. You cannot "share" an e-mail account with anyone else. Web-based e-mail allows you to access your e-mail from ANY PC, ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD.
English 304 will give your experience writing in formats that are common to the contemporary business world. Writing in electronic environments will be emphasized.
Prerequisites: English 1 and 2.
Proficiencies required to begin the course:
Recommended: Access to a grammar/usage handbook.
For on-line versions, see Resources
for Research and Writing.
I encourage you to buy a SCHEDULER BOOK or time-organizer book.
You should log the course calendar into your scheduler book.
That is, you are responsible for keeping track of the schedule deadlines for this course. Meeting this responsibility is part of the professional training that this course offers.
Remember that you must take pro-active responsibility for your learning in this course:
A Very Important Recommendation: When you send in exercises and drafts, you should use the "cc:" function in your e-mail to send yourself a backup copy, and you should then print this out and save it in a special folder or notebook. Then, in the unfortunate case that your e-mail message vanishes in cyberspace, you'll be able to prove that you submitted the exercise. When you print out an e-mail message, it automatically prints out the date the message was sent.
Scholastic Honesty and Plagiarism
I assume that I will never have reason to doubt your honesty. But I need to be clear about what is considered plagiarism for this course: plagiarism involves claiming as your own work the work done by another.
It usually occurs when you take something that someone else has written or produced, change it slightly, and represent it falsely as your own.
This is a serious offense and will be officially reported. Clear cases will result in an F and appropriate academic discipline. If you have any question concerning scholastic honesty, talk to me.
When you borrow material from others, just cite it carefully and completely.
Copying material
from the Web and representing it as your own is a particularly serious offense.
When you use the highlight-copy-paste feature to copy material from the Web
into your own work, be sure to put the material copied in quotation marks and
then be sure to list the title of the Web site and its Web address (its URL) in
a parenthesis that immediately follows the quoted material.
You send in all your exercises and drafts by e-mail to me.
When you send me a question via e-mail, you can expect an answer within 48 hours, unless I’m out of town on professional business. If you send your question on a Friday afternoon, you might not receive a response until the next Tuesday evening; I do NOT work on weekends, so 48 hours (2 work days) from Friday is Tuesday.
To be certain that your drafts or responses reach me and no one else, always send your work in a "new" message addressed to me.
To help you keep a record of your submissions, I recommend you use a descriptive subject line that indicates which assignment you are submitting.
Most students find it easiest to compose and save their assignments on a word processor. To send the assignment, I recommend copying the text and pasting it into a "new" mail message.
DO NOT send your assignments using the "attachment" feature of your e-mail software. Sending assignments with the attachment feature presents problems with incompatible file formats. Also, attachments can not be easily commented on. Use the highlight-copy-paste feature to insert files into your e-mail message.
Our course Message Board provides an electronic lecture room where I can post notices relevant to current issues in the course and where you can post questions or offer information.
We're trying to simulate a professional business environment in this course. We hope this simulation will help prepare you for your first professional position or enhance your performance in the job you already have.
Almost all professional environments now use e-mail and a LAN to enable their employees to network with each other. A LAN is a local area network – that is, everyone is tied together on the same computer system. You send and receive e-mail on such a system, and you receive lots of information from your company concerning your on-going work. That's what we're going to do in this course.
When you do post a message to the Message Board, everyone in the course will see the question, and everyone – including me – will be able to respond. By using the Message Board, you automatically have access to the collective wisdom of all the students in the class. So don't be shy in asking questions – we're all in this together. The Message Board serves as an electronic class discussion.
This course also fosters responsibility. Look at that familiar word more closely. It's made up of "response" and "ability" – being "responsible" means having and using the ability to respond to your environment, to be pro-active and assertive in directing your own learning. This course reinforces that attitude, as you will see.
Hand in all assignments on time.
Since the e-mail nature of the class allows you quite a bit of flexibility, the deadlines for e-mail exercises and final versions of work are absolute.
GUIDELINE:
You must hand your work in on time.
If you miss an e-mail deadline for the draft of any of the three assignments, you won't be able to hand in the final assignment, and you'll lose 100% of the credit for it.
If you hand in any of the three assignments late, one-half a grade will be deducted for each day it's late.
If you hand in an exercise late, I won't accept it.
It is essential – in a course given through e-mail – that you meet all the deadlines and keep up with the weekly schedule.
Because deadlines are important in professional writing, you should become accustomed to producing written work on time or early. Also, we will not keep reminding you about due dates and other important dates in the calendar. You have to do that yourself.
Late work is unprofessional.
If you have a technical or mechanical breakdown (your dog chomps your printer cable, your roommate throws your disk in the fish bowl, or your hard drive crashes), e-mail me immediately and we’ll negotiate a new deadline via e-mail.
If I don't hear from you by the time the assignment is due, I will not accept it.
Deadlines are called "deadlines" because, if you step over the line of what's permissible, your work is, in effect, "dead."
You should submit work that could be used in a professional setting. In drafts submitted via e-mail (a medium that allows only simple text features), I expect you to make use of format features like paragraphing, lists, and simple headings.
For final work, I will expect documents to include boldface, section headings, underlining, bullets for lists, effective graphics, and other techniques that increase the readability and overall effectiveness of the content.
Staple your assignment once in the upper left hand corner. Don't put it in a plastic folder or any other "container" device. Simple is better.
Please avail yourself of our on-campus computer labs. The newest is in White Hall -- it’s excellent.
Assignments and Grading Criteria
Assignment 1 (eMail memo): 10%
Assignment 2 (cover letter +
resume): 20%
Assignment 3 (outreach corporate
factsheet): 20%
Personal Experience Essay on “how
stuff works”: 20%
Exercises (10 exercises, each
counting 3%): 30%
Exercises:
Each exercise counts 3%. Each exercise will earn either 3 points or 0 points:
· 3 for fulfilling all parts of the exercise at a level of AOK
· 0 for unacceptable, not submitted on time, or not submitted at all
No revisions for the exercises are be allowed.
GUIDELINES:
You will be submitting a working draft for the three major assignments. Once you submit a draft, you are committed to continuing with the topic you've written on. That is, you CANNOT CHANGE YOUR TOPIC after you're submitted your draft. And you can, especially, not change your topic without talking with me and beginning the draft-review process all over again. There will no exceptions to this requirement. Any assignments you submit based on a topic+draft that has not been reviewed will definitely not be accepted or graded.
You must hand your work in on time.
If you miss an e-mail deadline for the draft of either of the three major assignments, you won't be able to hand in the final assignment, and you'll lose 100% of the credit for it.
If you hand in any of the assignments late, one-half a grade will be deducted for each day it's late.
If you hand in an exercise late, I won't
accept it.
It is essential – in a course given through e-mail – that you meet all the deadlines and keep up with the weekly schedule.
Grades on the major assignments are determined according to the following criteria:
•A (90-100 points): Exemplary work. A company could use the document without any revisions and might even use it as an example when training new employees.
•B (80-89 points): A company must be able to use the document with only minor revisions of content, presentation, or writing style/mechanics. Typically, the document will have no more than two patterns of error in punctuation, grammar, format, and spelling.
•C (70-79 points): The document is adequate, but requires substantial revisions of content, presentation, or writing style/mechanics (or some combination) before a company can use it. Typically, the document will have no more than five patterns of error in punctuation, grammar, format, and spelling.
•D (60-69 points): The document is unprofessional. It requires extensive revisions of content, presentation, and/or writing style and mechanics before it can be used by a company.
•F (59 points and below). The document cannot be revised. Its problems of content, presentation, or writing style/mechanics are so pervasive that a company would most probably give the project to another writer.
Grades of "Incomplete" will not be given, except in cases of unexpected or unpredictable physical or psychological trauma. Certification from the Dean of Student Life is required.
This course meets on-line.
You are required to be present, on e-mail.
You will need to check your mail at least three times a week. Ideally, you should check your mail every day.
When you send me a question via e-mail, you can expect an answer within 48 hours (with an exclusion for weekends).
If you intend to be out town -- and therefore out of e-mail contact -- for more than 4 consecutive days, send me an e-mail message saying this.
E-mail is your academic life-line to this course.