This syllabus is for an intermediate creative non-fiction writing course. Students will write personal essays exploring their experiences, beliefs, and ideas. The course emphasizes exploratory writing to discover new insights rather than arguing a fixed thesis. Students are guaranteed a B grade by meeting deadlines, participating in discussions, and revising assignments based on feedback. An A requires additional excellent writing quality. Course policies outline technology needs, file formats, deadlines, plagiarism, and how to request feedback on drafts by identifying specific problems and attempted solutions.

1. ENGL 208 SYLLABUS Page 1 of 4
Personal & Exploratory Writing
Ben Shane
bashane@uidaho.edu| brink hall 114
208 885-6156 |office hours: by appointment
This is an intermediate level writing course focused on creative non-fiction—that
is, not academic, argumentative writing. More specifically, you will be writing
about content that is personal to you, not limited to memoir/autobiography—
this might be experiences, beliefs, emotions, philosophies, spirituality, or anything
else that comprises your “person.”
The term “Exploratory” in the course title is a good indicator of my expectations
for your writing: personal writing should be an exploratory exercise. You may not
always know where an essay will end when you begin. To succeed in this course,
you will need to be exploratory, bold, and hard-working.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES: After completing this course, you will be able to:
• Tell a compelling story using literary techniques.
• Reach a broad and diverse audience with personal writing.
• Read, comprehend, and analyze published personal writing.
TEXTBOOK. You do not need to buy a textbook for this course. Readings will be
posted next to the “READING” icon in each unit on BbLearn.
Grades: Final grades are given according to a grade contract, which is posted
in full on BbLearn next to this syllabus. Grades are based on the following
measures:
You are guaranteed a final grade of B if you meet the following conditions:
(1) Late assignments. Don't have more than one late major assignment and one
late smaller assignment. We don’t have attendance, so timely submission of
work is especially important for you to keep up with the material and for me to
know you are putting in the effort.
(2) Prep Work. Keep up with prep work, turning in assignments as they are due,
not all at once before the final draft is due. This includes readings, responses,
rough drafts, and the occasional journal assignments.

2. ENGL 208 SYLLABUS Page 2 of 4
(3) Sharing and responding. Work cooperatively in virtual discussion boards. Be
willing to share some of your writing, to read the writing of others attentively,
and, when called for, give full and thoughtful responses.
(4) Major assignments need to meet the following conditions:
—Process. Always include process letter, all previous notes and drafts, and
all feedback you got.
—Revisions. When the assignment is to revise, don't just correct or touch
up. Your revision needs to reshape or extend or complicate or
substantially clarify your ideas—or relate your ideas to new things.
Revisions don't have to be better, but they must be different.
—Copy editing. When the assignment is for the final publication draft, your
paper must be well copy edited—that is, free from virtually all mistakes in
spelling and grammar. It's fine to get help in copy editing. (Copy editing
doesn’t count on early and mid-process drafts.)
—Perplexity. For every essay, you need to find some genuine question or
perplexity. That is, don't just tell a story about how fun it is to go to hiking in
the Sawtooths or a simple parable about why dishonesty is bad or why
democracy is good. Root your paper in a felt question about honesty or
democracy—a problem or an itch that itches you. This class is Personal &
Exploratory Writing, and we will take the exploratory aspect of that title
quite seriously. (By the way, this is a crucial skill to learn for success in
college: how to find a question that interests you—even in a boring
assignment.)
—Thinking. Having found a perplexity, then use your essay to do some
figuring-out. Make some intellectual/emotional gears turn. Thus your
story/essay needs to move or go somewhere—it should not be an
academic argument or fable with a hard-and-fast thesis or moral.
—Don't let these last two conditions bother you. I don’t ask that your
essays/stories always be ready for publication in The Atlantic. I care more about
working through the problem than about finding a neat answer. It's okay if your
drafts have some loose ends, some signs of struggle. But lack of unity or neatness
needs to reflect effort, not lack of effort.
Getting an A
As you see, the grade of B depends on behaviors. Grades of A, however,
depend on quality. Thus you earn a B if you put in good time and effort; I will
push you all to get a B. But to get an A, you have to make your time and effort
pay off into writing of genuine excellence (and also meet the conditions for a B).
Notice that for grades up to B, you don't have to worry about my judgment or
my standards of excellence; for higher grades you do. But we'll have class
discussions about excellence in writing and usually we can reach fairly good
agreement. Your final portfolios will play a big role in decisions about
excellence.

3. ENGL 208 SYLLABUS Page 3 of 4
Course Policies
1. Online Participation. Success in this course is dependent on your active
participation and engagement throughout the course. As such, students are
required to actively participate in asynchronous online activities by the
deadlines listed in project schedules.
2. Technology Requirements.
• Computer in good working order.
• Reliable Internet Connectivity.
• Reliable Backup. You will need a reliable backup to store the latest drafts
of your work other than the hard drive of your computer or an easily lost
thumb drive. Here is one I recommend http://www.dropbox.com
3. Accepted File Formats. The following are the only accepted file formats.
• Print Deliverables: Word or PDF. When you upload to BbLearn, the
document should appear with the submission, not just a download link. I
will not download dozens of documents to my personal computer.
4. Deadlines. All work is due by 11:59 PM on the day/date indicated in
the course schedules. Per the grade contract: “Don't have more than one
late major assignment and one late smaller assignment.”
If, when I start to grade your work, a file will not open or a URL link does not
work, I will notify you by email and you will be given 24 hours to submit work
correctly in BbLearn, but a late work point penalty will apply. To avoid this
problem, verify your submission (see policy 5).
5. Verify Submissions to Avoid Point Penalties. When submitting assignments,
students are responsible for verifying that files they uploaded are not
corrupted and will open and that URLs work. This means you must return to
the submissions box and open any files you uploaded. If your work does not
submit correctly, submit it again.
6. Compress Files Over 1 MB. Your work will lose points if the file you submit is
over 1 MB because large files slow down my ability to grade work efficiently.
7. University Disability Support Services. Reasonable accommodations will
be made for students with disabilities. Disability Support Services must
approve your request: (208) 885-6307• dss@uidaho.edu
8. Plagiarism. Violation the University of Idaho Student Code of Conduct will
result in a course grade of ‘F'.

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9. Contacting Me. You are invited to email me when you have a question or to
request a writing conference or feedback on a draft through email. If you
email during the work day, I will likely respond by the end of the day. During
the work week but outside the times of 8 AM—5 PM, you may expect a reply
within 24 hours. Emails sent over the weekend will be addressed on
Monday—I will try to reply sooner, but I travel many weekends and cannot
guarantee a reply before Monday morning.
If you are on campus, I invite you to make an appointment to come to my
office hours.
10.How to Prepare for a Conference or Request Feedback on a Draft.
I don’t provide a general “please look it over before I turn it in” type of
review.
Here’s why: I think all too often students get in the habit (frequently
encouraged unwittingly by professors) to show a teacher their work, the
teacher then says fix X, Y, and Z. And the student then fixes X, Y, and Z. All
this does, however, is teach a student how to comply with an authority figure.
It does nothing to help students become confident and more in charge of
their writing.
So, to prepare for a writing conference or request feedback on a draft
through email, do the following: review your work, and then if you think some
aspects are not effective, explain either during an in-person conference or
through email what problem(s) you see and be specific, next explain what
you did to try to solve the problem(s), and finally why you are not sure if your
solution(s) worked.