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1a. Before slotting in reading, design your essay assignments first: what kind of assignments, due dates for first version and for revisions. I strongly recommend the four essays and two revisions model. 1b. Articulating your course requirements: your syllabus should model the lucidity, elegance, and correctness you hope to see in student writing. At the risk of sounding Nixonian, I want to emphasize that you should make yourself perfectly clear. For an example of well-articulated course requirements, see these Model Requirements for a W Syllabus.
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2. Think of the writing assignments as a sequence in which you emphasize different skills. Four essays with identical aims (e.g., interpretive/analytic of a single text) will create problems: 1) it gets dull for everyone; 2) it can frustrate those students whose grades are not going up much or at all. While some students can benefit from trying to write the same kind of persuasive essay each time (esp. in English 100W), you are more likely to sustain the interest of all of your students if you plan to vary your assignments and make them build on one another. See further below for discussion of possible sequences.
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3. Planning your essay-assignment skeleton should also include the days on which you plan to distribute the assignments. By including such information on the syllabus, you make the centrality of writing more visible, and some assignments (if you follow the guidelines above) will require some explanation. Communicating your expectations is crucial! Repeatedly.
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4. Plan your student conferences. It is customary to schedule two conferences with each student. Decide when are you going to meet with students. You may cancel a class during a week in which you are meeting with students. See the CWP website for information about making conferences productive. The key is to require students to prepare for the conferences and to place the burden on them to talk about their writing before you intervene in the process. Schedule the meetings back to back to avoid running overtime too much: 20-30 minutes is enough, though with only 20 minutes you need to be careful to remain on task.
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5. Consider the reading load from class to class in relation to your writing assignments and in relation to the point in the semester. Some people structure the syllabus so that the entire novel or play must be reading by the first day it is discussed. This is very easy to do with plays, since most aren’t very long, and not as hard to do with novels as you might think. Students do the same amount of reading, but in different blocks. It can take some extensive tinkering as you plan your syllabus to get this to work, but with practice it can be done more and more easily. With the reading front-loaded, you can have more productive discussions in class. But even without adopting this model, you need to gauge your reading assignments to work well with writing process: if students are supposed to be revising and, as they should, spending at least as much time on the revision as they do on the earlier version, you need to assign less reading. That’s why you need to map out the writing assignments first. And you know students are going to be exhausted in the week before Thanksgiving and overloaded in the week before Spring Break. Shorter reading assignments, more time in class on their writing, or the showing of movies can help with these stretches. In short, put yourself in your students’ shoes and plan to make the pace and rhythm of your course conducive to good work.
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6. Selecting texts: you should teach from your strength and assign materials that might dovetail with your writing or graduate classes, but you should also bear in mind that you’re not going to get a typical class of undergraduates to remain engaged with a syllabus composed mainly of medieval, Renaissance, or 18th C texts. You need to mix in more recent works and some that you feel confident they will enjoy (often but not exclusively overlapping categories). Considerations:
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Historical organization: has the advantages that come with historical models of understanding; it gives you an implicit narrative of continuity and change over the semester. Thematic organization: has the advantages of linking works in a different way, and in a way that comes relatively easily to students. Obviously, you can combine the two. Focus versus breadth: thematic linkages among texts are desirable even when using a primarily historical model, but you must guard against creating too narrow a focus. Students do not have access to your course content when they sign up, and some will understandably be unhappy to find themselves in a course that focuses too exclusively on a theme, idea, or issue they don’t find interesting. A course exclusively on sci fi is not going to be to everyone’s tooth, while a course composed of Bildungsromane (depending on the choices) is more likely to speak to a range of people. So without losing coherence, be sure that a variety of students will find your syllabus and the concerns you bring to it sufficiently capacious. On these grounds, a syllabus featuring writings of a single race, gender, ethnicity, or class background is not desirable. This is a guideline, not a rule: clearly a course on working class fiction could feel too narrow or perfectly fine, depending on the authors chosen and the way class is conducted. Here, as always, you should remain aware of a fundamental rule: in intro classes it is most effective to meet students where they are and take them somewhere else. We want to challenge them, but we also want to create an environment in which they feel able to explore interests important to them, even when these interests don’t coincide with your own. Genre crossing: Cross-genre moments often work very well within a genre course. For instance, you might teach an Austen novel in conjunction with a Shakespeare play, or Browning’s monologues along side fiction or drama, poetry with anything. To the extent that your class wants to bring into focus generic conventions, a study of texts which treat similar materials using different conventions can be very effective. </LI>
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Possible Assignment Sequences: a close reading of a passage (with argument emphasized less than fullness and coherence of response); an essay developing a sustained argument about a single work; a comparison and contrast essay; an essay in which a late reading assignment is analyzed as a summary or commentary on the main issues of the course. If you vary your assignments and clarify your own sense of their purpose and value, more students are likely to feel that they are learning something about writing and less likely to feel that they are spinning their wheels if their grades do not improve steadily on each assignment. Other kinds of assignments: a book review (students read sample book reviews as models before writing their own); an entering-into-critical-exchange essay (in which students read about a crux in a work and take a position in relation to the dispute; e.g., why does Huck go along with Tom’s cruel treatment of Jim at the end of Huck Finn; which ending of Great Expectations is more effective; is Death of a Salesman ultimately more critical of the system or of Willy?). Sometimes a quick scan of recent criticism can help identify productive problems (while simultaneously enriching the scope of your own critical awareness). And more creative assignments: write out the dramatic subtexts for a key scene in a play and explain how staging and direction could help communicate those subtexts to an audience; rewrite a story or scene from a novel from another character’s point of view; rewrite fiction as drama or vice versa; write an original short story for a final project. With some assignments, it is a good idea to require a supplementary critical commentary: e.g., an explanation of why the character would see the story this way, a commentary on issues or problems raised by translating between genres, etc.
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