ENGL 281 D: Intermediate Expository Writing

ENGL 281 D - Crafting, Making, and Writing

Caption: "Arrests and Raids," 1976, embroidered textile called an "arpillera" which was a craft used to depict life for Chileans under the brutal Pinochet regime. Read more here.

Course Details

Instructor: Megan Callow - mcallow@uw.edu (you can contact me in Canvas or email me directly)

Term: Summer A-term

Format: Online, asynchronous. This means that, aside from optional (but encouraged!) office hours, we will not have any meetings in person or on Zoom. 

Credit: This is a 5-credit Composition ("C") OR Additional Writing ("W") course. That means if you pass, you will satisfy your C requirement by default. If you have already satisfied your C, then this course will automatically satisfy 5 W credits (you don't need to do anything except pass!)

Office Hours: I will survey the class at the start of the quarter to find out the most convenient time for office hours. Stay tuned!

Course Materials and Costs: All readings and video links will be provided within Canvas. Depending on the craft you select, you will need to invest in a set of materials (and if necessary, safety gear) to be able to produce and example of your craft. Please select your craft according to your ability to invest in the materials! Please reach out if you need ideas.

Course Description

The catalog description of this course is very brief: "Writing papers communicating information and opinion to develop accurate, competent, and effective expression." That means when it comes to what we write about, the world is our oyster! Because I am a crafter and a maker myself, I decided to center this writing course on that, and I invite you to explore with me questions like:

• What is crafting, and what is it not (and does it matter)?
• What are the social and political histories of crafts we care about?
• How does researching and carrying out a particular craft teach us more about ourselves?
• In what ways are texts also things that are made?
• Which forms of written expression best help us answer the above questions?

The most important things to know about this course are that 1) you will be reading and writing a LOT for this course (I hope that goes without saying, but you never know). Please budget your time accordingly. If you have a full-time job and signed up for 15 credits this summer, then this is not the course for you. 2) You will be selecting and making a craft of your own for this class!

Course Assignments

Course assignments fall into one of two categories: major assignments and informal assignments.

Major assignments include the following (see individual assignments for more detail!):

Craft Research Project: You will research some aspect of your chosen craft and present your research multimodally (but primarily in writing).

Craft Community Ethnography: You will do an extensive observation of a community dedicated to your chosen craft and present your findings in writing.

Craft Showcase & Reflection: You will compile your informal reflections on craft into a final showcase of your completed craft (or work in progress) in a final video essay.

Informal assignments include reading/video responses (usually in Hypothesis or discussion forums), ongoing craft reflections, and other small assignments including a reflection on your participation in the course. Details are within each assignment, which appear chronologically within the modules.

A Note on Course Structure

All course content will be made available chronologically (in order of due date) in the Canvas modules, and the modules are organized by week. 

To help you stay on track, all assignments will be due ONLY on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays by midnight (Pacific time). That said, this is an accelerated 5-credit summer course. You should expect to work on this class every day.

Course Grading Policy

In this course, all assignments are graded on a complete/incomplete basis. This means that, if they are submitted on time and meet a threshold of completeness (not quality), then you will get a complete. Each assignment will describe that threshold so there is no mystery for you. At the end of the quarter, your course grade will be determined according to the following:

• For a 4.0 grade: All rough and final drafts for major assignments and 90% or above of informal assignments complete
• For a 3.7-3.9 grade: All rough and final drafts for major assignments and 80%-90% of informal assignments complete 
• For a 3.4-3.6 grade: Most rough and final drafts for major assignments (up to one missing) and 80%-90% of informal assignments complete 
• For a 2.9-3.3 grade: Most rough and final drafts for major assignments (up to two missing) and 80%-90% of informal assignments complete 
• For a 2.8 or below: Some rough and final drafts complete and fewer than 80% of informal assignments complete 

If you find yourself on track to get a grade you are not happy with (check the gradebook regularly! If your assignment grades are not visible, please let me know ASAP), it is your responsibility to reach out to me via email or office hours as soon as possible. 

Because this is a summer course, it is simply not possible for me to implement a flexible deadline policy in this course, or to offer Incompletes. If you have a one-time extenuating circumstance, please reach out-- I'm very approachable!

Academic Integrity and AI Policy

I am one of those professors who acknowledges that AI is becoming a part of our lives at many levels, and I do not believe that banning it outright from a course is advisable or possible. Also, no matter what your future career is, you need to learn to plan, write, and revise your own original writing. LLMs might be able to help with this in future settings, but YOUR brain and YOUR voice are always the primary drivers. For that reason, and because this is a writing class, I expect you to do all your own writing. 

You MAY use LLMs to help you brainstorm, organize, or copyedit your writing, but you MAY NOT use it to generate original prose. Also, you must be completely transparent with me about how or whether you used any models to support your writing. To do so, every major assignment rough and final draft should come with an AI statement, about one paragraph, at the top explaining exactly 1) which model(s) you used (remember that Copilot, logged in via your NetID, is the only FERPA-compliant, and 2) how you used it, along with a selected screenshot of the chat you used. An example statement follows below:

For this assignment I used Copilot in a few ways. First, I used it to brainstorm potential titles. Copilot offered a title that I thought was cute, but a little too cute: "Knitting Friendzy." I liked the idea of a frenzy since this captures how I feel as I learn to knit, but the play on words was a little too cheesy so I considered "Knitting Frenzy" instead but then decided to shift it to "Knitting Chaos" instead since I feel the harder edge of the word reflects my personality. Second, Copilot suggested organizing my research subtopics into the following categories, X, Y, and Z. I couldn't develop a strong enough argument on subtopic Z so I switched it to A. Lastly, I used Copilot to copyedit my draft, and I accepted its suggestions for some spelling, punctuation, and syntax errors, but I felt it erased my voice too much with some of the tonal shifts so I ignored those suggestions. For example, instead of my original "To learn the purl stitch I had to watch KnitCat's YouTube video about one bazillion times and still I couldn't get it" Copilot suggested "To learn the purl stitch, I watched the YouTube tutorial entitled 'Learn to Purl' by KnitCat reapeatedly but I still struggled with comprehension." This makes me sound like a robot so I ignored it.