Writing for the World Wide Web
 faculty.salisbury.edu/~tamoriarty/web/syllabus.htm

Professor Tom Moriarty
tamoriarty@salisbury.edu
faculty.salisbury.edu/~tamoriarty

Welcome to English 307: Writing for the World Wide Web. This course will teach you how to plan, design, write, and evaluate web pages and web sites.

Materials and Textbooks
Textbooks
Web Style Guide, 3rd Edition. Patrick J. Lynch and Sarah Horton. Yale University Press, 2008.

The Non-Designer's Design Book, 3rd Edition. Robin Williams. Peachpit Press, 2008.

Other Materials
Disks/drives to back up your work.

Assignments
Labs, Participation, Reading Quizzes, and a Prototype (150 points)

Writing and Rhetoric Track Site Project
Site Plan (50 points)
Website version (100 points)
Smartphone version (50 points)

Salisbury/Salisbury University Web Site Project
Site Plan (50 points)
Website version (200 points)
Smartphone version (100 points)

Three Mediums Project
Web version (50 points)
Smartphone version (50 points)
Print version (50 points)

Worst Site Ever Project (50 points)
Short Paper and Presentation Comparing Web, Smartphone, and Print Design Principles (100 points)

Please Note...
All projects and assignments are due at the start of class on the announced due dates. Late projects will be penalized one letter grade for each day the project is late. You may not use templates for any of your work in this class. Quizzes may not be made up.

Attendance
Good attendance is an important part of this course. A great deal of your learning will take place in the computer lab, so good attendance is a must.

Here's the deal: you get 4 "free" absences this semester. That's two full weeks of class. After that, each additional absence will lower your final grade by one full grade. I do not make a distinction between "excused" and "unexcused" absences. All absences count toward the total.

Late arrivals to class count as 1/2 an absence. Cell phone interruptions will count as a full absence.

Computer Classroom Policies
Please finish checking your e-mail before class begins. If you are still fiddling with your computer when I take attendance, that will count as a late arrival to class (1/2 an absence).

When working with your stuff, get into the habit of regularly saving your materials to disks and other drives. And make extra copies!

Please be willing to help other students with the computers. Some of us are more familiar with computers than others -- please share your expertise.

Please note the rules for food and drinks in the computer classroom.

Writing Across the Curriculum
All writing assignments in this class fully support Salisbury University's Writing Across the Curriculum program.

University Writing Center
At the University Writing Center (directly above the Fireside Lounge in the Guerrieri University Center), trained consultants are ready to help you at any stage of the writing process. It is often helpful for writers to share their work with an attentive reader, and Writing Center consultations allow writers to test and refine their ideas before having to hand papers in to their instructors or to release documents to the public. In addition to the important writing instruction that occurs in the classroom and during professors’ office hours, the Center offers another site for learning about writing. All students are encouraged to make use of this important service. For more information about the Writing Center’s hours and policies, visit the Writing Center or its website at www.salisbury.edu/uwc.

Class Notes and Intellectual Property
The lectures that I deliver in this class and the course materials I create and distribute are protected by federal copyright law as my original works. My lectures are recorded or delivered from written notes to guarantee they are copyright protected. You are permitted to take notes of lectures and to use course materials for your use in this course. You may not record my lectures without my express consent and you may not publicly distribute or display or allow anyone else to publicly display or distribute my course materials or lecture notes without my written permission.

Plagiarism
The English Department takes plagiarism, the unacknowledged use of other people’s ideas, very seriously indeed. As outlined in the Student Handbook under the “Policy on Student Academic Integrity,” plagiarism may receive such penalties as failure on a paper or failure in the course. The Department’s Plagiarism Committee determines the appropriate penalty in each case, but bear in mind that the committee recognizes that plagiarism is a very serious academic offense and makes its decisions accordingly.

Each of the following constitutes plagiarism:

  • Turning in as your own work a paper or part of a paper that anyone other than you wrote. This would include but is not limited to work taken from another student, from a published author, or from an Internet contributor.

  • Turning in a paper that includes unquoted and / or undocumented passages someone else wrote.

  • Including in a paper someone else’s original ideas, opinions or research results without attribution.

  • Paraphrasing without attribution.

  • Turning in work that you submitted to another class.

A few changes in wording do not make a passage your property. As a precaution, if you are in doubt, cite the source. Moreover, if you have gone to the trouble to investigate secondary sources, you should give yourself credit for having done so by citing those sources in your essay and by providing a list of Works Cited or Works Consulted at the conclusion of the essay. In any case, failure to provide proper attribution could result in a severe penalty and is never worth the risk.