This course is designed to improve the fluency of students' writing with a focus on writing as an academic skill. Students will be introduced to the process of writing and be guided through the basic steps. We will practice writing well-organized paragraphs, summarizing, comparing and contrasting. Students will also get the chance to work with peer review - learning how to edit and working with other students to improve their own work. The work will take place online.

Writing is a skill, and if you want to improve, you need to practice it. I like to compare writing to playing football: you cannot learn to play football by studying the rules and watching football matches, you can only learn to play football by playing football. It's the same with writing. Of course, to write properly and without major mistakes, you need to learn some rules, the main thing, however, is the practice. And the practice should be regular. That's why in this course you'll be given writing tasks on a weekly basis, and you must finish those tasks within a week.

You'll be always given a full number of points for each exercise (that is if you fulfill all the requirements - e.g. if I ask you to write two paragraphs, you must submit two paragraphs, you won't get any points for one paragraph). You need to collect 110 points to get credit for the course (out of 140 points in total), so it doesn't matter if you don't manage to do some activities. Also, if you know that you won't be able to work online in a particular week, you can do all the tasks one week in advance. You cannot do activities with delay, or rather: you can do them but I won't give you any points for late submissions.

You can check the sum of your points in the Notebook Total points.

Remember to read course requirements too, esp. the part about plagiarism!

Instructor: Pavla Buchtova, email: pbuchtova@ped.muni.cz

zoom link for online consultations:

https://cesnet.zoom.us/j/99482048005

Course Requirements

This course will be based around work in this e-learning environment. Each week there will be different tasks and activities posted and students are expected to check the course at least once a week and do the tasks. Each activity will give the opportunity to get points, you can get 140 points in total and 110 points are necessary to pass the course and get credit for the class. You must complete the activity within the week it is assigned in order to get points.

Writing tasks and other activities

There will be ten writing activities and associated tasks. The activities will allow us to practice different kinds of writing. Each week you can get about 12 points for completing the tasks (and 20 points in the last 2 sessions, as the last 2 writing tasks will be a bit longer). This leads to a total of 124 points. 

Peer Assessment

One of the best ways to learn about how to improve your own writing is to work on helping others improve theirs. This means you will be given the opportunity to react to other students' writing and provide meaningful feedback. You can assess other students' writing 8 times, each assessment can earn 2 points. This leads to a total of 16 possible points.

Academic Integrity

Cheating of any kind is absolutely unacceptable. Plagiarism is defined as claiming someone else's writing as your own, e.g., copying and pasting from articles on the Internet. Quotes from other sources are acceptable as long as they are properly cited. Even if you take only ideas, and not specific words, from another author (that means that you paraphrase someone else's ideas), you must properly cite the original source (this includes your own translations). Any significant plagiarism will result in failing the course.