What is the genre of a syllabus statement?

Take a look at our course’s syllabus to identify some statements. How would you describe syllabus statements as a genre of writing? What are the “parts” of a statement? What does it do? Who is the audience? Who is the author?

Group Work

In groups, you’ll work in this Google doc. Indicate your group members’ names alongside your group’s contributions.

1. Use Google or another online search engine to find sample syllabus statements.
2. Draft a definition of a syllabus statement here. Think in terms of genre, where you describe a statement’s parts, function, and how it communicates with an audience.
3. Include samples of syllabus statements that you find online and say why you like them (or why you don’t).

After we discuss your findings, we’ll narrow our task to looking for syllabus statements specifically regarding the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in academic writing. I invite you to ask a large language model (LLM) to help you with this task. Report your findings in today’s Google doc.

Major Assignment 2

We will review the Syllabus Statement assignment together.

HOMEWORK

A lot of productive thinking happened in class today. I heard conversations about the value of syllabus statements and the way some statements devalue students. Some groups wrote with AI to learn about syllabus statements. All of you composed with human and nonhuman agents. In the words of Marilyn Cooper, these “agents are entangled in intra-active constitutive becomings” (129). Cooper suggests that reality–someone or something–was changed in the intra-action between you, your group members, the Google doc, and AI.

Reflect on your work today in your next blog post. Describe how you intra-acted with human and nonhuman agents. Describe what happened, what was changed. This is a rather open-ended prompt that invites you to reflect on syllabus statements you found in class as well as your experience as a student and a writer. As usual, this post should be no less than 300 words and you should integrate one of our readings so far. I invite you to use Morrison’s or Doyal et al’s texts, as well (both available on Blackboard). This is due on T 3/19 BEFORE you come to class.

Work Cited

Cooper, Marilyn M. The Animal Who Writes. U of Pittsburgh P, 2019.