Course Description
WRDS 150 is not your typical English literature class. It is a lot less subjective and open to interpretation. The course is focused on academic research and writing. The structure of this course can vary widely by professor and by the class topic. For instance, my class topic was scientific racism & sexism.
Types of Assignments To Expect
Note: The types of assignments can vary, but expect the following assignments to be uniform for most classes:
Research Proposal: This assignment should include a research question, the current state of knowledge on your research topic, and the form of the methodology used to answer your research question.
Annotated Bibliography: This is a bibliography where comments give a summary of the article and its relevance to the type of written assessment.
Group/Individual Presentations: These will most likely be group presentations since it is not as time-efficient as individual presentations when there is so much content in WRDS to cover.
Peer-Reviews: For individual writing assessments, students are asked to provide feedback on other classmates' work.
Engagement/Participation: Engagement/participation can come in the form of quizzes, lectures to watch, in-class learning activities, and completing academic integrity modules to avoid plagiarism. Engagement and participation can also come in the form of asking questions during lectures or office hours and writing on suggestion boards.
Literature Review(Research Project) - This is the final assessment of WRDS 150 where you incorporate academic writing concepts to answer a research question based on synthesizing relevant literature.
Advice/Study Tips
Don't be intimidated by the complex vocabulary. In WRDS 150, expect to read a lot of journal articles where there is an intense usage of jargon and uncommon words that aren't fluid in a conversational tone.
Keep track of unknown vocabulary words by keeping a vocabulary journal. In this vocabulary journal, you should find the definitions of these words and examples of how these words are used in sentences so that it will be easier to understand the dense scholarly articles.
Become more adept at reading long and dense articles by reading news articles or texts you enjoy. This requires a high amount of concentration and focus, so expect to require almost complete silence to complete most WRDS assignments.
You don't have to complete all of the readings. They're not mandatory. However, you should always refer back to them when looking for writing examples or specific terms to use for writing assessments.
This advice applies to any class, not just WRDS 150, but especially for WRDS 150, start all of your assignments as early as possible! You don't have a lot of time to procrastinate. Even if you think your ideas are terrible, just write them on a document and edit them later.
There is more flexibility in this class than in most first-year engineering classes. WRDS professors are a lot more likely to extend deadlines and are a lot more understanding of how stressful first-year university is. However, don't use that as an excuse for prolonged procrastination.
Always go to office hours. There is no doubt that you will be confused about some parts of this class and you can increase your participation/engagement mark in WRDS 150 by attending office hours.
Closely follow the APA Citation format. You would be surprised about how many marks you can lose just from not italicizing part of your citation or having incorrect indentations.
Always read the abstract of journal articles. The abstract can be a helpful guide to determining which articles are irrelevant or relevant to your academic search to prepare for your written assessments.
Keep track of English terminology such as "knowledge deficit" and "state of knowledge." These terms will prove very useful for outlining your research proposal and literature review.
Always ask classmates to read over your work. They can give you helpful ideas for how to improve your writing and give you feedback that you wouldn't have thought of while completing your writing assessments.
Feedback for peer-review doesn't always have to be constructive criticism or negative. You can provide positive feedback or compliments as well.
Resources
1. Here's a link to how to write a scholarly summary.
2. APA Citation Generator.
3. A video on proper paraphrasing to avoid plagiarism.
4. A tutorial on how to be more concise with your writing.
5. An example of how a scholarly summary should look Like
6. An article explaining the structure of a literature review
7. A great example of a literature review. Keep in mind that requirements for the literature review vary by class and the word count will be longer for your literature review.
8. An exemplary example of a research proposal with an annotated bibliography.
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