IW

Intermediate Composition 2 (Higher Intermediate)

• Pukyong National University (Daeyeon Campus)
• Fall 2020
• Course #109820
• Syllabus (forthcoming)
• Room: C25-530 (allotted room, but not likely used)
• Instructional medium: This course will be conducted with a blend of live Zoom sessions and some uploaded, pre-recorded videos in the LMS. It is unlikely that we will hold live classes in our classroom.

Prof. Kent Lee

• Office: C25-1103
• Office hours: By appointment

1 Course description

This course is designed mainly for sophomores, juniors and seniors in social science and humanities fields. The goals of the course consist of improving your academic English writing skills, and expressing yourselves better in English. This includes specific skills like:

1. Writing different types of paragraphs (definition, classification, narrative, etc.)
2. Prewriting techniques
3. Using basic sentence types effectively; this includes common second-language issues such as essay structure, style, wording, and grammar issues.
4. Developing main ideas, topic sentences, and body paragraphs

1.1 Readings and materials

The textbook for this course is a course packet, which will be made available in a PDF file in the LMS. Other materials will be available in the LMS and at this course website.

2 Tentative schedule

This is tentative, so you can expect changes and other activities, including readings, short paragraph assignments, and other short assignments. (HW = homework; ex. = exercise; ¶ = paragraph writing exercise; GF = online Google Forms; SE = short essay.)

week	date	topics	assignments
01	01 Sept.	Intro; self-intros; narrative paragraphs	GF; email ¶
02	07 Sept.	Narrative & descriptive ¶s; verb tenses
03	14 Sept.	Classification & example¶s; delimiters
04	21 Sept.	Definition ¶s; delimiters	¶
05	28 Sept.*	Process ¶s; infinitives, gerunds
06	05 Oct.	Contrast & comparison ¶s; relative clauses
07	12 Oct.	Evaluation ¶s; modals	¶
08	19 Oct.	Cause & effect ¶s
09	26 Oct.	Argumentation
10	02 Nov.	Midterms	Midterm
11	09 Nov.	Inductive, deductive, & hypothesis testing ¶s
12	16 Nov.	Analysis ¶s	¶
13	23 Nov.	Problem-solution ¶s
14	30 Nov.	Problem-solution; citing sources	¶
15	07 Dec.	Citing sources (Chicago Manual)
16	14 Dec.	Argumentation
?	?	Finals week	Final paper

3 Reference materials

3.1 Citation systems

The following are some commonly used citation systems; you can use any one of these for your papers in this course.

• See also this general introduction to citing and referencing sources.
• Brief Prezi on citing & referencing sources.

Style	Typical field
* Chicago Manual, short & long footnote styles	humanities (This is a more semi-formal citation style; end references are still required with footnotes)
* Chicago Manual (parenthetical)	humanities (This is a more formal style with Author+Year in parenthetical in-text citations) humanities
* Chicago Manual (all versions)	complete guide to all versions

If you have a lot of media sources, you might find Chicago or MLA easier to use.

3.2 Discourse & style issues

Read the relevant course packet chapters on coherence / transitionals, cohesion, reporting verbs, and word choice. We may go through some of this quickly in class, as this is rather dry. Please look at the examples and bring your questions, as you may or may not understand why some examples are given, or are flagged as problematic.

To revise and improve your midterm paper, first look at these more general guides to style and wording. Korean English errors Informal expressions L2 writing problems (global issues) Clearer wording guide Transitional expressions for speaking & writing

Then look at these more specific topics. Academic versus non-academic writing Adjectives Capitalization Commas Colloquialisms Colons and semi-colons Connectors (transitionals) L2 connector errors (East Asians) Delimiters (definite & indefinite articles) Konglish (vocabulary issues) Modal verb problems Punctuation symbols Reporting & communication verb problems Reporting verbs (comprehensive guide) Sentence types Subject-verb agreement Unprofessional tone Verb+preposition errors (and phrasal verbs)