Finally my mark popped up on my SSC today and I am was really surprised to receive an A+. Anyways for any other first years who are required to take the course but are not too sure about what it is like, here is some information for studying e.t.c. Please take it with a grain of salt:
What is ASTU?
ASTU stands for Arts Studies in Writing, from my interpretation it is basically an English course where you are taught the more practical aspects of “scholarly writing” by looking at research papers rather than novels e.t.c.
What was ASTU like?
My course was really nice (I know, ambiguous). Let me explain: It was tiny, we started off with about 14 people in the course and for some reason each week less and less people showed up, so the class size dwindled to 9. Normally I think the class size is 30 but this is still small for a University course…Most of my courses next year have about 300 people in them. We also only met once a week for three hours of which we did not really need the whole time. The course material was fairly simple and I often felt like we had more than enough time to cover everything. So even though I was a little sad that we only met once a week (everyone in the course was really interesting and friendly) I could not imagine meeting three times a week for the same course.
In the course we learnt how to write in a “scholarly” fashion. We learnt how to write a summary, lit. review, research proposal, and research paper. We also learnt how to analyze other academic writing and understand the functions of academic writing. One of the best things I though about the course was that we were encouraged to read research papers. As a high school student I literally never came across this type of thing…. and if I did I probably skimmed over it or scanned it for useful information. However, by being forced to read research papers I actually started understanding them a little better. I also think that this helped me a lot when I finally wrote my own.
What books did we use?
We read Academic Writing an Introduction by Janet Giltrow and the Broadview Pocketbook for Writers. Although the text book was easy to read and understand some of the terms such as “the Knowledge Making I” seemed like they were pulled from thin air as I could not find any more information on them anywhere. Also the idea of “making nonsense to make sense” really does not make any sense to me at all, c’est la vie, does anything make sense?
What did I learn?
I (and most of the others in the class) felt like our instructor was really good at marking our assignments. She often did this by asking questions about unclear things e.t.c. and stating the good and the bad. This helped me figure out where my academic writing was weak. I learnt that my writing is often quite vague and that I need to sandwich a lot more examples into my essays instead of expecting the reader to follow along. Other people found out that their writing was far to detailed e.t.c. so it was really nice to have all that individual attention in a Uni course. As I stated before I found the exposure to the research genre also quite eye opening. One day I went down into the journal section of Koerner library and just browsed through journal articles for a while. As a naive first year I been through all 12 years of mandatory schooling without actually reading a proper journal article before… I really wonder how some of the journals can survive as I cannot imagine that they attract a large audience.
Review Sheet
This is not a substitute for going to class, actually it probably will not make sense if you have not attended class, but I made this while I was reviewing for my final (basically a compressed version of my notes). Please use it as you like… if any information is wrong just tell me and if you would like to add to it please do so below!
Genre Theory = Situation + Form
– different situations require different forms -> different genres
Primary research: your own research
Secondary research: the research of others
How to Write an Effective Summary:
Use gist, higher level abstractions, lower level details, reported speech, citations
Key Aspects of a Summary: RMFFSK (not necessarily in this order just a mnenomic for the key aspects)
Research site
Methods
Focus
Findings
State of Knowledge
Knowledge Gap
Differences between citation, reported speech and reporting expressions
Citation: blah, blah, blah, blah (Soandso 197)
Direct Reported Speech- uses a quote: Soandso said “blah, blah, blah” (197)
Indirect Reported Speech- Summarizes what someone has said on a topic while still indicating the speaker: Sonandso effectively said nothing (197)
Reporting Expressions -He said “blah, blah, blah” (Soandso 197)
Anything that indicates that someone has said something, underlined above
Use a tree diagram to figure out your argument! Go from higher to lower levels. *I hate tree diagrams! Highest and lowest levels seem ambiguous to me, in the end everything is usually intertwined somehow.. right, but for the purpose of this course*
The world
|
The people
|
Their thoughts
/ \
Yes No
/ \
Mr. Yes Mr. No
Remember to report reporting!
Definitions:
-Create or reinforce common knowledge
– Sometimes used to box in a complicated term (or one that has many meanings) “For the purpose of this study we define students as human beings that go to an elementary, secondary or post-secondary school for more than 5 hours per week)
Types of Definition:
Apposition: putting an equivalent expression beside the term being defined often using: i.e , – ; “” ( ) :
Formal definition: sounds like a dictionary… narrows view
Sustained definition: places term by locating it amongst other phenomena… expands view (adds context)
Nominal Style: lots of long noun phrases!
– can create ambiguity
– leaves the rest of the sentence free
– increases the “density” of the sentence
– creates failed then revised hypothesis sequences
-> purpose: stabilization
Tenses:
Past: I was
Present: I am
Present Perfect: has ___________ed
Present Progressive: is ________ing
I hope this helps, obviously it does not cover anything in detail and I think that different classes might have slightly different slants on everything. Good luck in ASTU 150!