general information on the lectures

This is one of the areas where the online class is quite different from a face-to-face class. Rather than sitting for an hour and a half in a classroom where you are expected to follow (and take notes on) the lectures, all of the lectures are written down for you. The disadvantages are that you are doing a lot of reading rather than mixing it up with some listening, and you are unable to raise your hand to ask for clairfication on some point or to have a question answered. Turnaround for questions is slower, but, typically, e-mails are responded to pretty quickly. The advantages of having the lectures written our are also pretty obvious. You have a flexible schedule, meaning that you can look at the lectures when you have free time, not when class is in session, and you do not need to take comprehensive notes (the lectures are available for you to go back and re-read if you need to.

I do recommend you look at the lecture material early, as soon as you can. If questions do show up, then you want to e-mail them to me, and I will reply as soon as I can. the other reason for getting to this material early is because it all relates to other assignments you are doing, and (now this next part if very important), you are entirely responsible for the information in the lectures, just as you are responsible for the material in all of the assigned readings.

Here, simply, is what that means. If a lecture discusses how to read material critically, how to annotate, what sorts of items to look up, and so on, then you have no excuse not to be doing that with all of your reading. If a lecture tells you not to generalize but, instead, to always provide actual (experienced/observed/studied) examples, then if you generalize in your essays, you are going to earn very low scores. If a lecture explains how to incorporate quoted passages from your reading in your own writing, then you are expected to do just that.

you must have your texts for this class; saying you do not have a text is not a valid excuse for missing work or doing work incorrectly. This is a reading and composition class; there is no way you can complete it without the textbook.

You need the material from the first day of the semester. I typically send out the reading list the day you check in, so you have plenty of time to get the texts.

Note that some of the materials are avaialbe on reserve at the school library.

other required reading

As I added above, this also applies to all of the assigned readings. Some of the readings are models for your own writing. Some explain how to do things you probably do not, otherwise, know how to do. So if you were asked to look up how to do a Works Cited page in a handbook or on the OWL website, then, at that point, you are going to be expected to do and MLA-format Works Cited page correctly. This also applies to our class website information and samples provided on the site. They are there to help you learn now to do such things and format a document in Word or see what a formal sentence outline looks like.

So there is a ton of inforamtion designed to help you make it through the class successfully (I hope stupendously). You will find it incredibly difficult to make it through the class successfully if you don't go over the information and do the reading of the textbook material, lectures, web pages, samples. Take notes, look things up, re-read. If any of the material is unclear (after you have read it), be sure to e-mail questions ASAP.

And here I will repeat myself because it is important: you are entirely responsible for doing all of the reading in the class.

the links

Links to the individual lectures are all on the class Schedule page. Heck, just about everything has a link on the class Schedule page, so I urge you to bookmark that page; you will refer to it often.