WRT 105

Practices of Academic Writing:
Owning Words

Fall 2007
Syracuse University
MW 12:30-2:05
323 HBCrouse

Rebecca Moore Howard
Office: 237 HB Crouse
Office hours
Phone 315-443-1620
FAX: 315-691-9821
rehoward@syr.edu
AIM: ProfBfromWV


Last updated 25 August 2007

Course description

The course bulletin for Syracuse University describes WRT 105 this way:

Study and practice of writing processes, including critical reading, collaboration, revision, editing, and the use of technologies. Focuses on the aims, strategies, and conventions of academic prose, especially analysis and argumentation.
The learning goals for the course are on the Writing Program's website. Here is goal #4: "Students will learn to synthesize and integrate sources into their writing, including understanding when and how to cite quotations and paraphrases."

Meanwhile, SU has a new Academic Integrity Office, in its second year of operation. At the website for the Academic Integrity Office you will find a link to the SU academic integrity policy. That policy includes the statement, "Plagiarism is the use of someone else's language, ideas, information, or original material without acknowledging the source."

This section of WRT 105 is about that sentence. What does it mean to "own" words, such that they can be deemed to "belong" to a writer? In this section we will pursue all four of the learning goals for the course, and we will also work on practices of writing that will help you abide by the university's academic integrity policy.

At the same time, we will look critically at the cultural assumption that language can be owned--an assumption that underlies U.S. copyright law; plagiarism policies; and conventions of quoting and citing sources that are integral to the "aims, strategies, and conventions of academic prose." Why do these ideas matter so much to contemporary U.S. culture? How do these expectations help or hinder you as a writer? How possible is it for you to be original, and for that matter, how possible is it for you to acknowledge all the sources that have influenced your thinking?