Fall Calendar
Common Instructor Questions
Tutorial
Program
Student Resources 
The Craft of Research by Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, and Joseph M. Williams, 2nd ed. (University of Chicago Press, 2003). ISBN# 0-226-06568-5. www.press.uchicago.edu.
Easy Access by Michael Keene and Katherine H. Adams, 4th ed. (McGraw Hill, 2005). ISBN# 0073203378. www.mcgrawhill.com.
Desk copies of the two course textbooks are now available. If you have not yet received copies of these texts, please e-mail one of the Assistant Directors to arrange for delivery or pick-up of the texts. New TAs are required to integrate these texts into their courses, whereas returning TAs may choose to include or exclude them as they see fit. Please begin to familiarize yourself with these texts over the summer to prepare for our Orientation discussion of their integration into the model syllabus.
We recommend that you choose your scholarly readings for English 100 this Fall semester will from Daedalus and The Journal of Popular Culture. We have chosen these journals for various reasons that we discuss below, but most importantly because they are scholarly resources available for free to students through the University of Wisconsin's library databases.
Daedalus is the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a 225-year old professional organization for scholars and intellectuals. Daedalus is published quarterly, each issue devoted to a single but broad intellectual problem about which a diverse group of invited authors write essays. We have chosen Daedalus because its pieces are smart and challenging, reflecting the nature of academic scholarship, but also accessible. Though English 100 is not a theme or topic-driven course, students can turn to Daedalus, on their own time, to see how various scholars address an issue or topic that gets raised in class. Each issue usually includes six to eight essays devoted to the main theme, as well as a handful of other pieces, such as notes and book reviews. Most of the essays are about 20-30 double-spaced pages and are referenced using Chicago style.
A listing of back issues of Daedalus can be found at the Academy's web site: http://www.amacad.org/publications/back_issues.aspx . Information is also available at the website of the publisher, MIT Press: http://mitpress.mit.edu/ . You can access full-text versions of Daedalus articles online, for free, through the ProQuest database that UW-Madison Libraries subscribes to (http://www.library.wisc.edu/ ). Be aware, however, that ProQuest does not indicate which articles in Daedalus are part of each issue's special theme.
The Journal of Popular Culture is the official publication of the Popular Culture Association, which was formed in the late 1960s, with the goal of focusing on the study of material culture, film, comics, and other popular arts. The journal is peer-reviewed and published six times a year. We chose this journal because we hope its articles--and popular culture emphasis--will appeal to our diverse group of students, who often are avid devotees of cultural forms such as popular film, popular music, and television. The articles in The Journal of Popular Culture are academically rigorous and, at times, challenging, but allow students to engage their academic curiosity with topics that are somewhat familiar to them. Each issue generally contains seven essays that are not oriented around a particular theme, as well as an editorial and a number of book reviews. Most of the essays are 15-25 double-spaced pages and are referenced using MLA style.
More information about the The Journal of Popular Culture can be found at its website, http://www.msu.edu/~tjpc/index.htm. Information is also available on the website of its publisher, Blackwell Publishing, at http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/loi/jpcu. You can access full-text versions of Daedalus articles online, for free, through the ProQuest database that UW-Madison Libraries subscribes to(http://www.library.wisc.edu/).
The scholarly texts come into play during the second unit when the students work through a series of assignments to develop skills of summary and analysis that will later be brought to bear on the research project. What we'd like for each of you to do is to select a scholarly article from an issue of either Daedalus or The Journal of Popular Culture published in the last five years that you think would be interesting and generative for your students. The article that you select will be Text #3, and will introduce your students to the conventions and demands of academic writing. We require that the issue be current (i.e. within the past five years) so that a) there is some consistency across English 100 sections, and so that b) the issues raised by the articles are both somewhat new to you and current, so that they appeal to your students. Text #4 will be an article from these two journals that each of your students selects using the same criteria (i.e. it must have been published within the last five years).
Finally, in order to familiarize yourself with Daedalus and The Journal of Popular Culture, please work through the Flash Tutorials for accessing articles as soon as possible. You can find them here:
These will be also be posted on the Student Resources website.