Assignments

1. Introduce yourself briefly in a paragraph ~ 7 sentences long. Tell about your department and where you are from. Also tell what is most difficult for you about Lubbock and/or the U.S.A. Originally due TH Jan. 21. If you are late, you should do this assignment anyway; VS & students both required.

2. In a paragraph 7-9 sentences long, explain something that you consider a very hard aspect of writing. I gave a few in class (writer's block, understanding technology, organization, etc.) but it doesn't have to be one of those. Put it in your own words. Due TUE (Jan. 26) at midnight. This one WILL be published. VS & students both required.

3. Write a Teaching Philosophy. Explain how to teach what you love. Tell us your field and whom you would probably be teaching, but describe how you would teach concepts that are common in the field and what works when teaching them. Assume you are trying to get a job at an ideal school, and give the impression that you are exactly the person they need. Frame what you can do positively, and don't talk about things that don't work. You may want to read some before you start; if so go to this set or this set and read a few first.

4. Take the two sets of Teaching Philosophies (1-14, and 1-3), and read them. If your TP is an odd number, offer advice to the even writers. If your TP is an even number, offer advice to the odd ones. Be sure to be ready for TH (Feb. 4) class because this is when you will offer the advice. On TH you will take the advice that is given to you, and rewrite your own TP.

5. Rewrite the Teaching Philosophy and hand it in by midnight TH Feb. 4. It will go online with your first name on it unless you specifically sign it with your full name. If you want to change your name, or anything as it appears online, let me know. I will give you the logon and password eventually and there is really no problem with your changing anything that is yours. The only issues are with changing things that are not yours, or putting things up there that are not yours!

6. Choose the group you will be a part of, cell phones & life, or intercultural marriage & relationships, and find an article to summarize. We are seeking articles that are about a page in length, general (English-speaking) audience, and fairly recent, news-related. Google News is a good place to start looking, though we are not interested in simple changes in law (cell phones & driving now illegal in Chicago) - rather we are more interested in people's attitudes toward cell phones in their lives and intercultural adjustments etc. You will write a summary and reference of the article, but not until TUE. It is not necessary to print the article if you found it online, although printing is a good idea if you want to check whether it is appropriate. Choose the topic and find the article by TUE Feb. 9.

7. Write a summary and reference of your article, due tonight TUE Feb. 9 at 12:00. The summary should be a paragraph ~7 sentences long (a summary can be any length, but this is how we will do it); it should mention the author and title (make it clear it's about the article, not about the topic), and should have the main point and smaller points in your own words. It is not necessary to include details unless they are needed to explain to an audience who might not be familiar with the general ideas. Combine your points appropriately and do not neglect something that the author spent a lot of time on. The reference should be in APA and should include family name, first initial, date, title, title of publication, retrieved phrase, and URL of the article. Look at samples from previous classes for references. APA will tell you what to do with problem names, no date, etc. & APA rules are usually online if you look hard enough. Good luck!

8. You have been given a Concordance Assignment which will eventually ask you to write an essay about the way you write. The questions are: what online tools do you use? Could those tools be used differently or better to make you a better writer? We are betting that they can, and we are asking you to give them an honest try and write about it. If they don't work, at least you tried! See if you can use the concordance in the way we show you how to use it. One concordance is linked at the top of this blog. If you become shy about signing up, use our log-on. We'll be trying it as a class!

9. Summary #2 due TH Feb. 11, at 12:00. Read another article, same topic, and write a summary and reference for it. Try NOT to read one that your classmates have already done. Look for articles that delve into what people think of the topic. For example, an article about how young people feel it's safe to text and drive, is better than an article about how it's not. You choose the article; you don't have to print it. Just make the reference so carefully that we can find it! Read your classmates' summaries first. Get some idea of what's been done and what's out there. Go after the area or topic that interests you most. Good luck!

10. Summary #3 due TU Feb. 17 at 12:00. Read your third article, same topic, write a summary and reference for it, and send it by e-mail. Articles that nobody has done yet are best. You are graded on all three together, but part of your grade is picking the best articles and summarizing them well. Finally, the biggest issue is plagiarism. Remember that your work is published, so the stakes are high. It HAS to be in your own words.

11. Essay #1 due on TH. Feb. 19. Topic: Anything related to your field. You can tell us about problems in your field, or you can tell us about your research; you can tell us about issues in teaching in your field, or you can tell us about why you chose it.

Please think seriously about how you write: what process do you use? What tools do you take advantage of? How do you solve grammatical issues? How do you find vocabulary? You will be writing about this process.

Rewriting the summaries is not required for grammatical issues, but is necessary in the case of plagiarism. Don't make us delete it. This is true for anything you write.

The essay on using concordances is due a week from TH, Feb. 26. We will show you how to use it and expect you to try it.

12. Write a Folk Tale for Lerry's new baby. Every culture has many folk tales; tell us one from your culture or another. These are stories of things that happened, but they are usually fiction: animals may talk, or magic may be involved. Often they are told to children and sometimes they impart wisdom (they may have a moral, such as "slow and steady wins the race"). The important thing is that you tell it yourself (do not pick it up somewhere and use it), and that you be as complete as possible. Send it tonight (Feb. 23) at midnight.

13. Concordance Essay due TH Feb. 26. You can review it here.

14. Rewrite Essay #1.

15. First draft of the Introduction is due tonight, TH. Mar. 3, at 12:00. Introduce what your group wants. Start by showing how it's an important issue. You may want to include some background information about Texas Tech. We are here; we decided to do this study; we decided to find out ________________.

16. Data commentary #1 is due tonight, TUE Mar. 8. It is a simple paragraph describing one of the graphs that you were given, and telling how it might be useful to you. In the first part, you are to describe the trend as carefully as you can without getting bogged down in the numbers. Make it so someone who cannot see the graph can know exactly what it shows. Put it all in your own words. In the second part, you know what we will study (at TTU). How will this information transfer? If it is about race, and we won't study race, then maybe not...but, given what we know about Texas, what can we assume about the people we will survey? You may feel that this is speculation (it is), but even so, now you have some background, and you should use it to make a reasoned guess about how this will play out here at TTU.

17. I/LR/H. Intro/Lit. Review (12 articles) and Hypotheses (~6) first draft, due TH night. LR/H should be about two to two and a half pages. Show that you have read enough (10-11 articles, or at least the summaries) to know what you expect to find when you go and ask TTU students their opinion about your issue. You may separate out your hypotheses if you wish, but the reasoning behind each of them should be clearly retrievable from the Lit review section. Your hypotheses should be countable, clear statements about what you think will happen. For example, "(Based on the statistics I have showed you) we believe that TTU students are more likely to use their phones for social media than for texting friends during class." Feel free to use "we" even if it is only "you", but don't infer that your entire group agrees with you; if you suspect they don't, use "A few us felt that..."
or "We were curious about whether...." On the hypotheses there is no pressure whatsoever to be right, only to justify what you have guessed; however, you should spell out your entire line of reasoning. For example, if 1/12 marriages nowadays are intercultural, then you would find 1/12 marriages to be intercultural in Texas as well, right? No, possibly more, since Texas is more diverse than most states. But show it....tell what you suspect will happen, and why.

18. Write about the weather. It doesn't have to be an essay; a simple paragraph will do, and it's entirely for the purpose of entertaining your classmates, and getting started with your writing again after a long break. It will be printed on paper, but not graded or published on the blog. Have fun! Write about Lubbock, or your hometown, or anything unusual about the weather that you feel like writing about.

19. Final draft, I/LR/H due. You can either separate out the hypotheses, or include them as part of the Literature review (if you do, mark them, with a bold H or by putting them in bold; this will make your life easier). Concentrate on making your hypotheses provable and interesting, and supporting them, either by explaining your reasoning, or by using what you have read.

20. 13 surveys due on TUE Apr. 5. Fill one out yourself first. Find 6 American men, and 6 American women, any age, on campus or in Lubbock. We are studying the Lubbock community, so do not ask people from out of town. Collect any more than 13 that you want. If you collect some from internationals, come back and get some more, and collect them too.  Feel free to collect them on the online version or on paper. We will probably enter the paper ones onto the online form, for the purposes of counting.

21. Write a paragraph about your experience collecting surveys. Where were you? What time of day was it? Were people nice to you? Did anyone say anything unusual about the subject, or the way the questions were worded, or anything like that? Did you have trouble getting six males and six females? Just tell what happened. Any insight about the way people answered questions is helpful. Due TU night, Apr. 5, 12:00

22. The Methods Section is due TH night, Apr. 7. The main parts of the Method Section are: First, tell what we wanted (you may want to include the other group although in the end you stress what you wanted). Second, tell how we made the survey. We asked them many questions, but in particular we asked them certain ones that would help you get to your hypotheses. At this point, if you haven't defined your terms (addicted, experienced, religious/non-religious), and you need to, you probably should. Then, tell how we printed a survey and made an agreement to distribute it: 6 Am. males, 6 Am. females, one for ourselves, and as many others as we wanted. We agreed to aim for Lubbock and Texas Tech. Finally, tell how we collected it and put it into the online survey generator, so that we could figure out the facts.

If there are any questions that were inadequate, now's the time to bring it up. It is not wrong to say that we asked it one way, but should have asked it another; in fact, we look like better social scientists if we critically analyze our own survey. If you can do this without blaming your lead researcher, you look even better, although I don't mind; we did the best we could.d

23. Results section. Put it in this order: We thought this would happen; this actually happened (Generalization); these are the numbers.  Cover all six of your hypotheses, even if we failed to get adequate numbers, or you guessed wrong. When you get to a generalization (for ex.: Women are more likely to prefer texting than men), consider isolating that group. For example, what else can you say about women, or, what kinds of women's cell phone behavior is similar? Include that in the results section as well.

There are various ways to make the results section larger. When we isolate a group (i.e. people who are less tolerant of intercultural marriage than their parents), we get insight into the people in that group. Certain things may be related; for example, people who feel like a cell phone is like a limb, and people who have actually experienced sleep disorder or excessive stress. By isolating these groups, we can get useful insights that will make an otherwise predictable paper much more interesting.

One other thing counts as results: the fact that people were nice to us, and were willing to talk to us about it. Even if the survey makes someone mad, or they don't know how to answer it, that's a result. Ideally, we can learn from these results, but only if we point them out, and talk about them, so that we can do it better next time.

24. Discussion section (first draft due TU Apr. 26 at midnight): In the Discussion section, go through your six generalizations. Explain why they happened. Tell why they are important. Show how they relate to what you found in your literature review.

You may want to start with something very general; for example, why this is important or who might need to know more about cell phones / intercultural marriage (perhaps only you). What insights were you after? How can we use the information? But the key is in your data. You found facts that are helpful and interesting; point them out and show why they are interesting. You thought critically about the results and came out with insight about some of our topics: addiction, cell phones & dating, tolerance & compromise in marriage, etc.

As you compile your paper you may find that it is short of the twelve pages (actually 11 1/2 minimum) of full text that is required. Remember, title page, abstract, graphs, appendices, bibliography don't count. To make it larger, look back at #23. It's the meat of the paper that you'll have to make larger; here you can only discuss what has gone before. You have to point out the results; if you don't, you shouldn't be discussing them in the discussion. Good luck!

25. Entire paper. First draft due TU May 3, paper version (in class or under office door by midnight), and e-mail version in e-mail by TU at midnight. 12 pages, not including cover page, abstract, appendices & bibliography; not including graphs. 12 pt. font, New Times Roman or Cambria; indented, no space between paragraphs, no space between sections, no extra spaces between sentences/words. 12 references should be cited appropriately and referenced in the bibliography; most of these will be in the literature review. Final Draft due TUE May 10, paper version in class, or paper version under my office door (FL 272) by midnight. Word-file attachment in my e-mail by midnight as well. I do not print this one, but I share it with graders and they may print it if they choose.

26. Putting it online. It is your responsibility to put it online and make it look nice. You are actually graded for this, but it is a minor grade that goes into your last-half grade, and will not ruin your grade if you do it poorly. Take the log-on and password that you receive in class (I will not write it here) and go to blogger.com. If the security wall stops you (or protests that you are logging on from an unknown computer) use my phone number, or, keep going to blogger.com with the appropriate password. You will see a screen that allows you to paste a word file directly (under compose). Paste your paper there. You may want to separate words and graphs in the process. As long as they are labeled (Fig. 1, Fig. 2) it shouldn't be a problem, but if it is, label them. Graphs can stay as a word file, and so can the rest, if you are happy with the way it looks, and you don't mind the way the computer formats it.

If you want to change anything significantly, often the only way to change it is remove formatting, which will throw it into a very basic mode, no indentations, no special print, no centering. I actually like this basic mode, but you have to learn how to leave an extra space for paragraphs, and go back later to put in such things as bold and italics. Feel free to make it look good however you want. Put the title of your paper in the title slot; put your name, in any form you want, wherever you want in the paper. We do not need the white space that your title page and abstract will provide; remove that if you can. If you are absolutely frustrated with the formatting, e-mail me and I will help you with whatever aspect you want.

27. Football Essay / QEP essay. Write this on either football or QEP. Note: All academic writing should have citation/reference if outside sources are used. The only people who have to rewrite this essay are those who misunderstood this rule. These essays are graded once and will be in the envelope on my door.

28. Final Exam / Final Paper: To know your grades, send an e-mail early next week.

Concordance Assignment

The purpose of this assignment is to get you to focus on your system of writing and to see if any new tools can possibly make it better. There is one in particular, the concordance, that we feel could make it better, though you are welcome to write about other tools that you have found or that you use. What you will do is simple: spend some time examining what you do and how you do it; try using something new to help you do it; report to us, in essay form, what you did and how it worked.

Our favorite concordance, so far, is here: http://corpus.byu.edu/. It is not the only one but as far as we can tell it is the best one. We will spend some time in class showing you how to use it effectively. Your job is to try it and report to us how it worked. If it doesn’t work well, tell us why. Give us examples.

This essay is not due Feb. 25. But we want you to try to use new things that help your system, so we want you to have enough time. The concordance is useful in the problems you mentioned in the Writers’ problems assignment (see weblog); you don’t have to address the ones you mention, but try to use the concordance to make yourself a more effective writer. That’s the goal. Good luck!