English 202/Critical Thinking and Composition
Why take English 202 (besides the fact that it’s a required class if you’re planning on transferring)? English 202/Critical Thinking and Composition is an advanced writing course that will help you further develop the writing skills you learned in English 100.
In English 100, you learned about the writing process (pre-writing, drafting, and revising) and about different ways to organize your essays. In English 202, we will draw upon those skills and talk about more advanced ways to write essays to help you succeed in your more advanced college classes. One of our goals by the end of our semester together is to make it much easier for you to write essays not only for our class, but for all of your other classes as well.
A second goal of English 202 is to develop our critical thinking skills. In my class, we will do so by discussing and analyzing readings that investigate contemporary American popular culture and society and the values, roles, and identities that make us who we are. The primary textbook we will be using is the 8th edition of Signs of Life in the USA. When analyzing the readings from Signs of Life, we will also learn to question the assumptions, logical and rhetorical arguments, and viewpoints of the authors in order to create a healthy skepticism about what we study.
Above all, in our English 202 class we will work on our analytical skills. Developing our analytical skills doesn’t mean that we will start criticizing everything we see; rather, developing our analytical skills will enable us to look at our own experiences and the world around us in a more questioning manner as we seek to discover what things mean and how and why they came to be that way.
If you take English 202 with me, you’ll be writing essays that analyze aspects of the world around us, such as advertising and our behavior as consumers, Web 2.0 culture, television and media, and trends in popular culture. The final project in our class will be a 12-15-page research essay in MLA format that is on a topic from popular culture that you get to choose. If the idea of a long essay like that scares you, please don’t worry — for we’ll spend a lot of time talking about how to write a long essay to help prepare you for the kinds of essays you’ll need to write during your college career.
Our books will be the following:
- Signs of Life in the USA, 8th edition
- “English 202 Lecture Notes” (available only at the Palomar Bookstore)
- Diana Hacker’s A Pocket Style Manual (optional, but recommended)
A digital copy that contains most of Signs of Life, 7th edition, can be found here on Google Books. Just be aware that since this is the 7th edition, it doesn’t have all of the readings that we will be doing in our class.
For a copy of our course syllabus, please visit our class Canvas website.
Resources for our first essay:
- Haul video from Bethany/Macbarbie07
- Haul video from Fowler Sister/juicystar07
- Jackson Katz’s documentary Tough Guise: Violence, Media, and the Crisis in Masculinity
- Sample TV commercials:
- Gilette Venus Razor from 2000
- Weight Watchers’ “The Power” commercial
- Suzuki’s 2016 “green” Vitara Commercial
- Ram Trucks’ 2013 Super Bowl “Farmer” Commercial
- Ford Mustang 2013 commercial
- Brett Favre Wrangler jeans
- Carl’s Junior 2016 commercial
- Clips of gender roles in cleaning product ads
- Dove’s Beauty Evolution
- Dove’s 2013 Real Beauty Sketches commercial
- Parody of Dove’s Real Beauty Sketches
- K-Mart Ship My Pants
- Old Spice’s 2010 “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” commercial
- BuzzFeed’s “If Women’s Roles in Ads Were Played by Men”
- Ellen De Generes’ parody (from 2012) of Bic for Her pens
- GardenCrew’s analysis of an Olive Garden commercial, while watching it sixty times in a row
- Article from Ad Week about a Canadian hair salon’s controversial ads
- Advertising Age‘s website
- Vintage Ad Browser — a website that contains over 10,000+ old ads
- Sarah Haskins’ Target Women analyses of TV commercials and shows that target women:
- “The Power of Words” video
- Taylor Mali’s spoken word piece “The The Impotence of Proofreading”
Resources for our second essay:
- “Social Bankruptcy” clip from the TV show Portlandia
- Prince EA’s video for his spoken word piece “Can We Autocorrect Humanity?”
- Gary Turk’s spoken word “Look Up” video
- “Generation Like” story from Frontline
- Article from The Atlantic called “Socality Barbie Hits Uncomfortably Close to Home” about a “tongue-in-cheek Instagram account [that] underscores the paradox of social-media autenticity”
- LA Times article from 2012 called “Some Teens Aren’t Liking Facebook as Much as Older Users”
- Lecture (50 minutes) by Nicholas Carr at the Harvard Book Store on his book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
- Short video (6 minutes) with Nicholas Carr called “The Neuroscience of Internet Addiction”
- Clay Shirky’s response to Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” — Shirky, Clay. “Why Abundance is Good: A Reply to Nick Carr.” Britannica Blog. 17 July 2008. Web. http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2008/07/why-abundance-is-good-a-reply-to-nick-carr/
- Nicholas Carr’s response to Clay Shirky — Carr, Nicholas. “Why Skepticism is Good.” Britannica Blog. 17 July 2008. Web. http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2008/07/why-skepticism-is-good-my-reply-to-clay-shirky/
- Clay Shirky’s TED Talk called “How Social Media Can Make History”
- New York Times article about online reading — Rich, Moto. “Literacy Debate: Online R U Really Reading.” New York Times. 27 July 2008. Web. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/arts/27iht-27reading.14806779.html
Resources for the TV essay:
- Link to a full version of the “Diversity Day” episode of The Office that we watched in class
Resources for the research essay:
- Video from North Carolina State University Libraries called “Picking Your Topic IS Research” on doing pre-searching before starting your research essay
- A link to Dashboard, Palomar’s anti-plagiarism tutorial
- Scholarly/peer-reviwed vs. popular sources
- Explanation from the SUNY Geneseo Library
- Explanation and video from San Jose State University
- Short video from Wayne State University that explains the differences between a scholarly source vs. a popular source
- Professor Randy Pausch’s shorter video on time management
- Professor Randy Pausch’s longer version (76 minutes) of his video on time management
- The Writing Center at UNC Chapel Hill’s page on how to avoid procrastination when writing
- Useful article called “How to Stay Focused while Studying, Backed by Research”
- Includes time management strategies and also tips for using sites like Coffitivity and brain.fm to increase your productivity
- University of Minnesota’s Research Paper Navigator — helps you do backwards planning for research topics
- Baylor University’s Research Paper Planner — helps you do backwards planning for research topics
- Librarian Natalie Lopez’s website for our class
- Laurier Library’s video on writing a good research/inquiry question for your research essay
- Link to UNC Chapel Hill video on color-coding your research sources
- Link to UNC Chapel Hill video on using webbing to come up with ideas to write about
- Link to EasyBib, a citation engine that will help you do your Works Cited page
- ** Download Bedford/St. Martin’s Press’ MLA 8 2016 booklet for how to cite sources
- Samples and Overview of MLA 8 from the Purdue OWL website
- The University of Maryland’s website that shows examples of how to do many sources for your Works Cited page in MLA 8 format
- Sample Outline — If you have any classes that require you to do a formal outline, this handout will show you how to do one in MLA format
- Sample Research Essay from Diana Hacker’s book in MLA format, including a Works Cited page in MLA 7 format
- Sample Research Essay from the Purdue University OWL in MLA format, including a Works Cited page in MLA 7 format