Section 5, Hume 101
Spring 1998
The University of Mississippi

Course Policy

Instructor: Mr. John B. Padgett

Office: 204 Somerville

Telephone: 232-7718

Office Hours: 9:15-11 a.m. Tuesday, Thursday

Other hours by appt.

E-mail: egjbp@olemiss.edu

WWW: http://www.olemiss.edu/~egjbp

Somerville Hall
Click on image to view location on campus map

Required Texts:

• The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter Fourth Edition
• Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

Attendance:

You are required to attend class. Hence, you will be allowed four (4) penalty-free absences. For each absence after the fourth, your final grade will be lowered half a letter grade.

In addition, you should be on time. Not only is it rude to enter class five or ten minutes late, late arrivals also are likely to miss pop quizzes or other graded class work.

Evaluation:

Your grade in English 206 will be calculated according to the following percentages:

For each of the two essays, you will be required to submit for approval a planned topic for a three- to six-page paper. In addition, you will write several drafts and must have your paper critiqued by your class peers using an online form. Essays and all preliminary drafts must be turned in on the dates due. Both essays must be typed and double-spaced, and both will require outside research.

Daily work will include pop quizzes, in-class writing assignments, small group projects, and class participation as well as regular participation in "SOPHLIT," an on-line E-mail discussion group for this class. All written work, including SOPHLIT postings, must be done during the day or week in which it is due (i.e., you cannot make up quizzes missed, SOPHLIT entries due two weeks ago, etc.). Also included under daily work will be your online critiques of your classmates' essays (copies of your critiques will be sent to the instructor automatically). Failure to do any of these required components will drastically reduce your chances for a good daily work grade.

Both essays and small-group projects may become part of the web page for this course.

Both the midterm and the cumulative final exam will include a variety of short answer, identification, and/or multiple choice questions, and each will require you to write an in-class essay.

Computers:

Each student in this class is required to participate in "SOPHLIT," an on-line E-mail discussion group on the Internet. Students should send E-mail to "SOPHLIT" on various topics relevant to American literature a minimum of once per week. For students who do not own a computer, microcomputer labs in Weir Hall and the University Writing Center (located in the basement of Bondurant Hall) allow first-come, first-serve access to E-mail, the World Wide Web and other Internet activities as well as word processing and other computer programs.

Students must first subscribe to SOPHLIT to send and receive messages. All students should be subscribed to SOPHLIT and submitting messages by the fourth class meeting (January 20). To subscribe, send E-mail to md@listserv.olemiss.edu containing the single-line message

subscribe sophlit

If you have an E-mail account on Sunset (sunset.backbone.olemiss.edu), you may telnet to that site and use the E-mail program Pine to send your request. After logging onto Sunset, type "pine" (without the quotation marks) and press [ENTER] to start the program. Then you may press "C" to compose an E-mail message. In the "To:" field, type md@listserv.olemiss.edu. Use the [TAB] key to place your cursor in the Message Text area, then type subscribe sophlit To send your mail, press ^X (the [Ctrl] key and "X" simultaneously).

sophlit@listserv.olemiss.edu

Getting an E-mail account:

Students who do not yet have an E-mail account may obtain one at the Help Desk in Powers Hall. Other locations may also be set up on campus to accommodate students. You will need your student ID card (a photocopy of it will be made), and you will need to read and sign an appropriate use policy. If you need IBM or Macintosh software, take a 3.5-inch floppy disk with you.

For additional guidance on how to use computers and services on the campus network, call the Computer Help Desk at 232-5222.

Academic Honesty:

I expect that all work submitted by students for fulfillment of the requirements in this course, including E-mail and other on-line work, be performed by the student. Forms of academic dishonesty include, but are not limited to, cheating on exams and plagiarism.

Plagiarism:

Plagiarism is a serious form of cheating. To plagiarize is to claim another's ideas or writing as one's own. In a sense, it is a form of stealing.

Plagiarism can take several forms. Students often associate the term with writers who copy entire passages from a book, magazine, encyclopedia, or other printed source and turn them in to an instructor as their work. This is, perhaps, the most blatant form of plagiarism as well as the easiest for instructors to detect. After all, English instructors have spent years studying style, and they can usually recognize a passage lifted from Time magazine or other sources with distinctive styles. In fact, instructors can usually recognize professional writing, even if they cannot immediately identify its source.

But plagiarism takes several other forms. For instance, students plagiarize when they borrow ideas from other writers without giving them credit. In this case, students might not even use the other writer's language; nevertheless, they are stealing the writer's content. Students also plagiarize when they present another student's work as their own. Thus, documentation involves more than just citing the source of direct quotations.

Because plagiarism is such a complex concept to come to grips with in its entirety, take note of the following summary definition:

I.	Plagiarism includes the literal repetition without acknowledgement of the writings of another author. All significant words, phrases, clauses, or passages in a student's paper which have been taken directly from source material must be enclosed in quotation marks and acknowledged either in the text itself or in the endnotes.
II.	Plagiarism includes borrowing without acknowledgement another writer's general plan, outline, or structure of argument in the creation of one's own organization.
III.	Plagiarism includes borrowing another's ideas and representing them as one's own. To paraphrase the thoughts of another writer without acknowledging is to plagiarize.
IV.	Plagiarism includes allowing any other person or organization to prepare the paper and submitting it as one's own work.

Plagiarism in this course will not be tolerated. Any student who turns in plagiarized work in this course will be dealt with severely. Penalties for plagiarism include, but are not limited to, failure in the course, suspension, and permanent expulsion from the university.