A: This course is not restricted to freshmen.

A: This course will earn students one-half of their writing requirement.

A: It will not do that; this course assumes you know about the nuts and bolts (sentence structure, topic sentences, how to footnote; how to paginate) so it focuses on higher-level skills such as how to construct an argument and offer evidence for your claims; it stresses good form and overall planning of the project; it focuses on expository writing rather than personal writing or journal writing.

A: Ask the WATU office or your advisor for a list of courses that offer this kind of attention, and transfer out of this course and into one of those.

A: WATU credit requires at least twenty ( 20 ) pages of writing, not including bibliographies, title pages, and other non-text. I report the fulfillment of WATU credit to the WATU office independently of the grade for the course, which is reported to the registrar.

A: The Percentage of the grade in this course that is earned by class participation is 15% and there is more about this on the page on student responsibilities.

A: Citations in the text should be brief. In the bibliography you may have an article authored by LeClerc, France, Bernard H. Schmitt, and Laurette Dubé ("Foreign Branding and Its Effect on Product Perceptions and Attitudes." Journal of Marketing Research. Volume 31, May 1994, p. 263- 270) but you should cite this in the text only as 'LeClerc, Schmitt and Dubé 1994' the first time you cite it, and afterwards as 'LeClerk et al. 1994' with page numbers if there are any.

A: If you are having trouble because of health or other issues, you will first of all need to inform me immediately rather than after the deadline has passed. If I am asked, I will perhaps give permission for an extension, but not after the fact.

Because this course is built on the idea that writing needs to be done in stages, built-up from outlines, fleshed out with new content, critiqued, rewritten, and revised, papers must be handed in on time. If this doesn't happen, I will post a failing grade for you on the Blackboard site, which you can view immediately, and hopefully do something about. Occasionally, a student has ignored all deadlines, frequent warnings, and followed a different drummer; not too long ago, a Wharton freshman did just this, and earned an F for this course. I warned him; I warned his advisors, and he ignored the warnings. He began his career at Penn with a failing grade in one of his courses.

A: there are at least 3 possibilities:

• A WATU tutor is available for this course specifically, who will meet with you if you request an appointment to do so.

• You can ask me to help you.

• There is a drop-in writing center, staffed with writing helpers, who you can turn to.

• There is also a help system that can assist you with other skill development, such as time management (see below).

A: IMHO, the most valuable skill to develop is how to manage your time. This involves such things as

• Estimating the amount of time a project will require and then working back from the given deadline, to see when work needs to begin.

• Calculating how much time you have for this and other requirements this semester, and planning to do an hour or so on each project each day.

• Keeping a pocket calendar in which you record deadlines.

• Being pro-active and starting work on projects earlier than you think is necessary, rather than drifting along until time is suddenly gone, and you're up against the wall.

• 

A very useful statement about this by a Harvard Professor who studied this issue for 10 years can be found at this site.

Penn students often have breezed through high school without much to challenge them; the work was easy, and could be aced the night before the deadline. Now you are among peers, or even among fellow students who may be smarter than you, and the requirements of courses are now vastly more complex than they were in high school. You are at Penn, not at East Podunk State Teachers College, and the faculty expect much more than you may be prepared for. You also don't have your parents to run interference for you, threatening lawsuits against the school district for `unfairness' or whatever used to work. You're on your own, and need to start taking responsibility for your life and your own success.

A: Some of the most common excuses nowadays involve computers:

• My computer crashed!

• My hard-disk crashed!

• My printer is giving me trouble (ran out of ink; paper jammed, gives me error messages)

• I overslept! (My roommate failed to wake me!)

• I woke up with a migraine!

Moral of the story: don't wait until the last minute to print the paper; back up your files on diskettes; buy a reliable alarm clock. (I don't hear the dog ate my homework! excuse so much any more; Penn students usually don't have pets in the dorms.)

A: Consult one of the House Deans in your residence hall; they're set up to help you in various ways, such as with personal problems, time management issues, or other issues.

A: You're not in high school any more. The reason I am so fussy about these things is simple: In the real world nobody has to read what you write. Therefore, you have to make people want to read what you write, and you have to make it interesting and you must be helpful to your reader. You have to convince your reader that you have something to say and are not just blathering about a topic you know nothing about.

• The Statement of Purpose tells the reader what you plan to do; if the reader isn't interested in your topic, s/he'll stop reading right there.

• The Review of the Literature tells the reader you have researched your paper and have consulted all the work done by others that people who know something about this topic expect to be consulted. If you don't inform your reader of this, your reader may think you lack credibility and will stop reading. Your review of approprite sources establishes your bona fides or credibility.

• Linking your Conclusion (or Summary) to your Statement of Purpose tells the reader that you have done what you set out to do. Many readers may ignore the body, read only the introduction, the RoL, and skip to see your conclusion. If the conclusion is unrelated to the rest of your paper, or is wishy-washy, or just isn't there, your reader will stop reading. If you don't have a clear conclusion, the impression is that you just stopped writing, ran out of time, energy, interest, or didn't care much about what you were doing.