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 LRS (a.k.a. The Little Red Schoolhouse, a.k.a Academic and
Professional Writing, a.k.a. English 13000)
Course description and goals
You've worked hard on a research paper for four weeks.
You've moved in to Regenstein, forgotten your social life, and devoted yourself to
an obsessive pursuit of knowledge that would make a Supreme Court judge look frivolous and
unfocused. Yet when the paper comes back -- bad news. The grade isn't all you
would like it to be, but more importantly, it's clear from the professor's comments that
he or she just didn't get the point you were trying to make. What happened?
What happened is something that happens to many writers at
many different levels, but that happens most often to writers who have complex, difficult,
and interesting material to communicate: readers react in ways we don't anticipate.
They focus on ideas that we meant to be tangential, they fail to follow the
argument at its key points, and they seem to miss completely the ideas that we found to be
fascinating and believed to be the focus of our work. Are our readers stupid?
It's always a possibility, of course, but it's not a safe (or diplomatic) assumption to
make about professional and academic readers. What you can safely assume, however,
is that good ideas can be obscured by bad prose, and that a productive response to
miscommunication is to learn ways to communicate more effectively.
The Little Red Schoolhouse is a course designed to help
you do just that. We approach good writing not as a sterile grammatical exercise or
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. We teach what these structures are and how to use them; and we also
teach you how to identify and revise parts of your work where you can safely predict that
readers will have trouble or lose track of your main idea.
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LRS
structure, workload, and grading policy
The course's intensive 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 with six or seven
other students in a seminar once a week 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 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. You may take the course pass/no
pass if you inform your Lector about it early in the quarter; your Lector will inform you
what the mandatory pass/no pass date is for each quarter. If you wish to take the
course pass/no pass, we strongly caution you to ask your advisor whether this grade will
affect your ability to graduate or your student loan status.
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Common
Questions about LRS
May English as a Second
Language students take the course? Yes. Many ESL students have taken
LRS at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. While LRS does not address ESL
concerns directly, our students report that it has been immensely helpful both for their
writing in English and (in many cases) their writing in their native language. 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 papers do
LRS students write? Most papers are between three and four pages long; the
final paper of the quarter is around seven to ten pages. Our assignments specify two
things: the nature of your audience (are they experts in the subject?
beginners? 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
must choose a serious subject of some kind, and we strongly encourage you to write about
your major field. Thus economics majors write about economics, English majors write
about English, biology majors write about biology, and so on.
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Registration
How to register: You may register
for LRS through your advisor, as you would for any other undergraduate course. The
course number for undergraduates is English 13000. This year, the course
will be offered to undergraduates in Winter, Spring, and Summer quarters.
What next? If you cannot get into the course, you can attend
the first two days of class (Tuesday and Thursday of first week
at 3PM) and be added to the waiting list. If you have a non-negotiable
scheduling conflict, you may call the Writing Program office at 702-1936 to tell us you'd
like to take the course. When you attend the class, a Writing Program staff member will
take down your name, note your place on the waiting list. We'll be able to tell you on the
second day of class (Thursday) if enough registered students have dropped to allow you to
register for the course: if you're admitted, you'll need to register for the
course with your advisor. If you don't attend class on both Tuesday and Thursday,
we'll assume that you don't want to take the course that quarter and will add other people
from the waiting list.
What are your chances? Pretty
respectable, though it varies from quarter to quarter. We're always able to get at least
some people from the waiting list into the class each quarter.
What if you can't get in? If there aren't
enough drops, you can consider auditing the course -- you can attend the lectures, but
cannot attend a writing seminar, turn in assignments, get feedback on your work, or
receive course credit.
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Other writing resources for undergraduates
The advanced writing cluster: In
the 2005-6 academic year, the Writing Program will offer at least three advanced
writing courses: Writing
Biography and Writing Law.
Writing resources on the web:
You may read Joseph M. William's and Lawrence McEnerney's Writing in College for an overview of as
drafting, revising, and crafting an argument in a college paper. Check our Grammar Resources page for a selective listing of
writing sites on the web. 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.
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Queries:
writing-program@uchicago.edu
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