English 1114--Comp II

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English 1114--Comp II    HOME PAGE                 Welcome to Eng 1114!  I am glad to be working with you in this "Composition II" course.  Check out all three columns on this page to get started; then read or thoroughly skim the other pages on the yellow bar above.  If you have questions, let me know!  You can always contact me by clicking on "Contact Richard" in the upper-left corner of each of these web pages. How does this website work? This website has about a dozen web pages.  The main ones are above--just click on what you want.  This middle column is different on each page.  It always has the primary text or content to read. The left column always is exactly the same.  It lists the main pages again, and it also has other especially important pages and links. The right column is different on each page.  It has useful links and also helpful tips for taking the course. -------- What does Eng 1114 involve?        As you may know, this course is one of three available Composition II courses--this one is three credits and is meant especially for those who plan on continuing on to a four-year college degree or more, and who especially want more practice of academic writing.  All three Composition II courses involve learning to write research papers.  This one, however, focuses especially on reading and writing about one or two academic (usually nonfiction) books or the equivalent, and learning how to further analyze, argue, and critique in college.  The kind of semester-long project writing that this course involves, research shows, is the type of learning that students remember better and, years later, the type of learning that students say really helped them.  For example, IHCC English Professor Nick Nownes was talking with a former student of his who had gone on to a degree at the University of Minnesota.  According to Nick, the student "just finished a political science degree, and he was saying that his instructors would periodically drop big research papers on him--'I need eight to ten pages!'--sometimes a quarter of the way or even later in the semester, more or less without instructions..., just a topic and a due date.  (Sometimes the papers would be mentioned in the syllabus, and sometimes they wouldn't.)"  Nick's student was very glad that Nick--and Inver Hills' research writing courses--had prepared him well. I, myself, have been teaching courses like Eng 1108 and Eng 1114 over thirty years, and I still very much enjoy teaching them.  In fact, composition happens to be my special field of English.  I have published several articles in academic journals and have made two or three dozen conference presentations about the teaching of writing.   I also have had over 100 publications of  popular-magazine articles and fiction stories, scholarly essays, photographs, and even a few poems in magazines and journals.  (Click here for my resume or a sample fiction story.)  As you can guess, I really love writing--and I love teaching writing, too! If you ever have any questions, just ask me before or after class, email me, come to my office, or call me at home.  I look forward to working with you!  :-) Richard   Where can you email me? Please don't email me at my school email, as I only check it once or twice a week.  Instead, email me at my professional email address, which I check almost every day: "richard at jewell dot net."  However, first convert it to regular email form: e.g., sue@smith.net. (Why am I printing it this way?  There are software programs called "spiders" that automatically find email addresses on Web sites and sell them to junk-email advertisers. I'm already receiving several hundred junk emails per week--many of them, but not all, blocked. Printing my email this way on a Web page helps me avoid more junk email.)     Return to top.