Weekly Writing Labs

LIBS 7007 has a strong writing component that reinforces the analytic reading techniques learned through engagement with the Course list of articles within the sociology discipline.

Each Course Week includes a classroom writing lab, structured around the technical principle that mastery of correct paragraph structure is the effective means toward command of academic English.

Paragraph and Essay, at the formal level, stand in relationship of Microcosm and Macrocosm.

The writing lab component is organised as follows.

1. An analytical task is set on a section from Course Reader article.
2. From the analytical reading, a topic sentence is created, on the model taught in lecture.
3. From the topic sentence, a sequence of development sentences are devised proving the topic sentence by either reason or evidence.
4. The paragraph is concluded with a linking sentence in the form of a summary.

The Labs teach paragraph structure week-by-week in sequentially advanced principles, on the understanding that non-fiction writing is techne: where mathematics is a formal rule-based system using number as its material, non-fiction writing is a formal rule-based systems using words as its material.

The student files each week's Lab work in a folder provided, and at Course Week Fourteen the sequence of filed work forms the material for a Final Examination preparatory Lab that presents and practices the relation of paragraph to essay: part to whole and microcosm to macrocosm. 

Weekly Lab work has no independent Grading consequence, but rather it forms a significant, and empirical, part of the 25% Participation  Grade for the Course.