English 305
Course Guidelines and Policies
In order not to be dropped from the
course, you must send an e-mail message that includes your name and your e-mail
address to Dr. Miles by
Please read all sections in the table
below, as an introduction to the course.
Begin with the Welcome section and proceed from there.
The 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 305 -- Scientific and Technical 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.
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 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 AND 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 how to turn in
Assignments #1 and 2. You send them to me by first-class mail. The address will
be:
Thomas Miles
RR 6 Box 248 VF 159
Mail your assignment in an 9 x 12" envelope. Include both your assignment
and a self-addressed stamped 9 x 12" envelope so that I can mail your
graded assignment back to you.
Everything else will be the same for you as for all the other students. Good
Luck!!
We offer English 305, Scientific and Technical Writing, as a Web-based course with e-mail conferencing.
The course is Web-based because 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 a Message Board. You should check in on this Message Board every day. You can participate in a message board discussion on a topic, or start a topic question yourself. Continuous discussion on a message board topic is called "threading."
You will be conferencing with me electronically via e-mail, on every assignment. I encourage you to contact me as often as necessary during the semester.
I will answer your e-mail within 48 hours, unless I am 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 and open faculty office hours mean that this course is based on tutorial-style learning, in which you can contact me anytime for private intellectual help. This tutorial system is similar to that used throughout the great European universities since the Middle Ages, altered and enriched, of course, with the addition of e-mail.
That is, you must take a personal, vigorous initiative for your own learning in this course. I will act as a mentor, not as a lecturer or 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 your conference professor, 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.
It's in the bookstore. Check out its Help page: Online!
There are two textbooks on reserve if you want to look at them for supplementary material:
Miles, Thomas H. 1990. Critical Thinking and Writing for Science
and Technology.
Reep, Diana C. 1997. Technical Writing: Principles, Strategies,
and
Please e-mail me, Dr. Miles, if you have questions as the course begins.
See the Course Calendar for more information, and be sure to read all other sections on this Guide page.
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 305 is taught as a Web-based course, with e-mail conferencing on all assignments. There are no class meetings. The course is limited to students who will have completed 64 credit hours by the time the course begins.
In order not to be dropped from the course, you must send an e-mail message
that includes your name and your e-mail address to Dr. Miles (tmiles@wvu.edu) by
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
We assume that we will never have reason to doubt your honesty. But we need to be clear about what is considered plagiarism for English 305: 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 your professor.
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 in order to include it in your work, be sure to list
the Web site and be sure to include the material copied in quotation marks.
Using E-Mail To Reach Me
You send me all your exercises and drafts by e-mail.
When you e-mail me a question, you can expect an answer within 48 hours, unless I am 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.
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 that can make an attachment look like
alphabet soup on your reader's screen. Also, attachments can not be easily
commented on. Use the
highlight-copy-paste feature to insert files directly into your e-mail
messages.
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.
I’m trying to simulate a professional business environment in this course, and I hope that 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 the professors – 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), e-mail me immediately and negotiate via e-mail about getting your assignment in.
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, you're, 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, underlining, and other techniques that increase the readability and overall effectiveness of the content.
Staple them once in the upper left hand corner. Don't include them in a plastic folder or any other "container" device. Simple is better.
There are two labs that are run by Academic Computing.
One is in White Hall, and the other is in the basement of the Evansdale Library.
You will need your student I.D. and, possibly, a paid fee statement.
Assignments and Grading Criteria
There are ten exercises. Each counts 3%. Each exercise will earn 3 or 0 points:
· 3 for AOK, in all parts of the exercise
· 0 for unacceptable, not submitted on time, or not submitted at all
No revisions will be allowed.
The exercises are:
· Message Board confirm
· introductory note – Week 3
· plagiarism – Week 4
· topic search – Week 4
· Web page – Week 6
· grammar – Week 7
· full-text databases – Week 8
· federal search engines – Week 10
· sources – Week 11
· unexpected consequences – Week 13
These ten exercises, at 3% each, total 30% of your total course grade.
There are three major writing assignments:
1. a fact sheet about the profession you intend to enter - 20%
2. a report on a technical upgrade - 40%
3. a personal experience essay – 10%
GUIDELINES:
You will be submitting a working draft for each of the first two assignments. Concerning Assignment #2: 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 two 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 two 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 two 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.
Grades for the Course
The final course grade will be determined mathematically using the same scale as that used for the two major assignments:
A = 90-100
B = 80-89
C = 70-79
D = 60-69
F = 59 or below
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, unless I am 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.
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 and to your conference professor.