A word on Engl 210, from the student’s point of view:

Prior to taking this class, I thought that being a good writer was only important if you were an author or journalist. I thought that being a good engineer mean that you were good at physics and math and that you are able to solve problems in a creative way. However, an important piece of the puzzle that I was missing was being an effective writer. As the semester progressed, I understood that writing is a thinking tool. A person that is an effective writer, is deadly, in hitting you with their ideas and arguments. They can make a genius look like a fool. They can bring people up and put them down. In essence, it is about taking all that clutter in your brain, and putting it on paper, or into spoken words. You can be the best math and physics student in your college, but if you don’t know how to write, you are going to be a lousy engineer. I now firmly believe that all people should learn how to write and practice it constantly.

-Michael Bartsevich

Mechanical Engineering Student

Class of 2024

 

Course: Engl 21007, Section K

Classroom: Virtual Classroom Access

Schedule:  Tuesdays and Thursdays, 8:00am- 9:15am

Course Description

This course will help you to hone the critical reading and thinking, research, and writing you will need to succeed in all of your writing courses and specifically your engineering courses. This course is also preparing students to write as engineers in professional environments. We will examine, analyze, and create various types of technical communication such as: memos, letters, instructions, definitions, descriptions, designs, proposals, and presentations. You will learn to synthesize information, find answers, and present ideas to some of the different audiences you will encounter. Learning to write well will enable you to present yourself in the best possible light in all situations. You will learn how to communicate your knowledge, plans, and ideas in a professional manner. Our time in this course will focus on reading and listening, essential steps in the writing process, effective writing, synthesizing material from various sources, and the ability to locate and evaluate relevant library and online research. We will also examine how writing is impacted by the elements of the rhetorical situation. By the end of the course, students should be confident in utilizing this knowledge in the construction and completion of a writing portfolio and self assessment.

What EXACTLY You’re  Doing in This Course:

In this course you will learn to read, write, and speak thoughtfully and critically within your discipline. You will produce various written works in discipline specific genres and give presentations surrounding scientific topics of your choosing. Hopefully this rhetoric and writing practice strengthens your writing skills throughout your academic and scientific career.

How This Course Works:

This course is an online synchronous course hybrid course, meaning we will meet in a zoom classroom at a regularly scheduled time and date. These meetings will serve as your face to face (f2f) classroom meetings.  Students will still be responsible for attending all scheduled f2f classes and handing in all work ON TIME and properly completed. Students will also be responsible for posting projects, presentations, and responses to these projects in specific folders on Blackboard. I will let you know when these postings are due; keep in mind they are mandatory as they are part of your homework and participation grades. These responses can transfer to f2f discussions held in class, so they must be thought provoking and thorough. This course also has a main course site on the CUNY Commons where various reading materials and assignment prompts will be housed. We will move back and forth between these platforms throughout the semester.

In addition, there will also be a number of designated “hybrid” days that the class will meet asynchronously; there will be no “formal face to face (f2f) meeting,” but there will be an assignment due and that will count as a both attendance and classwork grade for the day. You will be notified in advance of these days. Asynchronous assignments will also have time sensitive deadlines.

This class is also heavy on group work. Groups will be determined by the instructor and will remain throughout the semester (barring any unusual occurrences). Students are expected to communicate with their group mates often and be cooperative and demonstrate proper group work behavior. It is extremely important for students to attend all class meetings, as these meetings are when students will learn the required genre work for the class and discuss the assignments for the course. There will also be peer review workshops for draft work.