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 Little Red Schoolhouse (English 33000) course goals
You've worked hard on a paper, proposal, or chapter for
months. You've gathered your materials, schmoozed at conferences, and endured
conflicting advice from everyone who takes an interest in your progress, from your
advisors to your family to your cat. Now you're ready to write your opus at
last. You begin to imagine receiving your degree. You begin to imagine a life
after grad school.
But when your draft comes back from your readers -- bad
news. They can't pick out the key points of your argument. They latch on to
some remark that you believe is tangential to your main point -- an afterthought you threw
in at 3:00 AM, the product of a little carelessness and a lot of caffeine. And they
can't understand how the concepts that have haunted you for months can function as
contributions to your field.
What happened? Are your readers stupid? Are
they so obsessed with their own work that they can't summon enough intellectual effort to
try to understand yours? Anything is possible, but neither supposition is a safe (or
diplomatic) one to make about academic or professional readers. What you can safely
assume, however, is that good ideas can be obscured by writing that doesn't conform to
readers' expectations of what academic and professional prose should be. Rather than
grumble about your readers, then (though of course you can do that too), you can respond
to this kind of miscommunication more productively: you can learn effective ways to
communicate within the academic or professional community you are seeking to join.
The Little Red Schoolhouse is a course designed to help
you do just that. We approach writing not as a collection of arbitrary rules, but as
a study of readers. Readers predictably find certain sentence structures, paragraph
structures, and text structures to be more clear than others. And different readers
look for different structures. The writing strategies you use for an audience of
experts in your subfield won't work for a more diverse audience, such as a grant committee
or hiring committee composed of specialists in a variety of fields. We teach writing
principles that can be applied consistently in many different fields, and provide you with
opportunities to practice adapting these principles to suit the needs of different
audiences. We can also help you learn to identify and revise parts of your work where you
can safely predict that readers will lose track of the main idea or fail to appreciate its
significance.
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LRS structure, workload, and grading policies
The course's structure and workload have
been designed to help writers learn to focus on readers. As a student in LRS, you
will spend one of the class's two weekly meetings in a lecture focused on a principle of
clear writing. You will then practice these principles in two ways. First,
you will write one paper a week for ten weeks. Second, you will meet in a seminar
once a week with six or seven other graduate students to read and discuss each other's
work. These seminars, which are led by a Writing Program Lector, will allow
you to hear how at least six real-world readers respond to your work. They will also
provide you with an opportunity to prepare a formal, written critique of one other
student's paper each week. These critiques are an integral part of the course, because
they allow you to practice communicating about writing in a way that goes beyond reporting
subjective responses (e.g., "I liked it," "It stunk") to offer genuine
constructive criticism and concrete suggestions for improvement.
Grades in the
course are based on the papers students have written, on the paper critiques they produce,
and on their participation in seminar discussions. Paper requirements differ
for graduate students who are taking the course for a letter grade (A, B, C, D, F)
and those who are taking it for a "Pass."
Papers for the letter grade and "Pass"
options: Students taking the course for a grade write eight assignments
designed by the Writing Program (see the Assignments
section). If you take the course for a grade, you cannot fulfill the assignments by
turning in papers or sections of papers originally intended for some other purpose.
(An exception to this rule may be a rewrite assigned at the discretion of your
Lector.) If you take the course for a "Pass," you must still turn in eight
papers, but after completing the first three Writing Program assignments, you may
then turn in revisions of current work for the remainder of the quarter.
Who may take the course for a "Pass":
Because LRS is an advanced writing course for graduate students, an "A"
in the course indicates that a student is a superior writer at the graduate and
professional level. An "A" is (frankly) hard to get. If you are a
graduate student taking the course simply to improve your writing skills in your field,
therefore, we encourage you to check with your department or program to see if you may
take the course for a "Pass." (NB: The Law School does not allow
its students to take the course for a "Pass.") If your department or
program permits, you may take the course for a Pass if you inform your seminar's Lector of
your intention by the date your Lector specifies at the beginning of the quarter.
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Common questions about LRS
May English as a Second Language students take
LRS? Yes, but it should not be considered a substitute for the kind of
specialized training in English idioms that many students need in order to meet the
demands of extensive graduate and post-doctoral work in English. It is true
that many ESL students have taken LRS at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, and
report that it has been immensely helpful both for their writing in English and (in many
cases) their writing in their native language. The course helps all students think
about the needs of their readers and how best to structure their work to meet those needs.
The course also provides all its students with the opportunity to write and get feedback
on eight papers a quarter, and that practice alone has boosted many students' English
skills. Still, LRS does not directly address many important ESL concerns,
especially concerns related to the proper use of idioms, definite and indefinite articles,
and the labyrinthine complexities of English verb tenses. For courses explicitly
oriented toward ESL matters, you may read The ESL Resource,
which is maintained by the Office of International Affairs.
What kinds of
assignments do LRS students write? All students turn in eight papers.
Most papers are between three and five pages long; the final paper of the quarter is
around eight to twelve pages. If you're taking the course for a Pass, you may turn
in sections of your work after turning in two or three LRS assignments. If you're
taking the course for a grade, you must complete an LRS assignment for all eight
papers. Our assignments specify two things:
- the nature of your audience (are they experts in the
subject? beginners? somewhere in between? Are they deeply interested?
completely apathetic?), and
- the nature of your rhetorical task (are you trying to
persuade readers? simply present information?).
The paper's subject matter, however, is up to
you: you will summarize research in your field, analyze material in your
field, and make arguments about matters important to your field. Thus
economics students write about economics, literature students write about literature,
biology students write about biology, and so on.
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LRS Registration
Who may register: You may register
for LRS (English 33000) as you would for any other graduate course if you are a University
of Chicago graduate student in the Humanities Division, the Social Sciences Division, the
Biological Sciences Division, the Physical Sciences Division, MAPH, MAPSS, and a number of
other M.A. and Ph.D. programs in the University. Please check with your program to
determine whether the course can count as credit toward your degree. You may also
register if you are a professional school student in SSA, the Divinity School, the School
of Public Policy, and a number of programs in the Pritzker School of Medicine. Many
professional schools require that their students follow a special procedure to take a
course in the Humanities Division; please check with your program to determine their
requirements. MBA students in the Graduate School of Business should take Business 583; Law School students may take English 33000 only for a
letter grade, not for a Pass.
If the course closes: We do not
maintain an ongoing waiting list for graduate students. If the course is closed you
may, however, sign in with Writing Program staff during the first two days of class.
What are your chances of being admitted? In most quarters, some students from the ad
hoc waiting list are admitted to the course when registered students drop the course or do
not show up. Once the Writing Program staff has determined that there is an open
space, you must then register in order to receive course credit.
If you still can't get in:
If not enough registered students drop to allow you to enter the course, you may wish to
take the course in another quarter or you may audit. If you audit, you may attend
the lectures, but you will not be able to attend seminars, write papers for the course, or
receive course credit.
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Other resources for graduate students
Check our Grammar
Resources page for selected links to on-line grammar and style guides. If you wish to
be delighted by good writing or amused by bad writing, or if you are just desperately
trying to procrastinate, check our Sentence of the
Week page for a notable sentence each week.
What about writing tutors? The writing tutors
program, which is managed by the Academic Skills and Assessment Program, is a College
program for undergraduates and does not at present provide writing tutors for graduate
students. Although the Writing Program does not provide such a program either, we
can on request help graduate students find private writing tutors on an ad hoc
basis. Call the Writing Program office at 702-1936 for further details.
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Site designed and
maintained by Tracy Weiner. Please direct technical questions or comments to her at writing-program@uchicago.edu; questions
about the Writing Program's courses may be directed to Tracy Weiner or Kathy Cochran at
the same address.
This page has last been revised
in May, 1999
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