2 5 assignment writing notes assignment

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ENG 122 - Composition

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This guide will introduce you to the Shapiro Library and provide you with information and resources as you learn the writing process. Use the menu on the left side to browse through this guide's content. If you have any questions, Ask a Librarian via Chat 24/7 or email! Check out our contact information and chat button at the top right of many of our website pages.

Assignment Examples

Click on the PDFs below to view sample assignments to help guide you through the course. 

• ENG 122_1-6 Writing Notes
• ENG 122_2-5 Analysis
• ENG 122_3-2 Writing Plan
• ENG 122_4-3 Thesis
• ENG 122_4-6 Summary
• ENG 122_5-2 First Draft
• ENG 122_7-2 Final Draft
• Next: Selected Readings >>

• Daniel M. Clark

ENG-123: English Composition II at SNHU

• May 1, 2020

Other Stuff on the Blagh

Weekend Writing #8

Weekend writing #7, weekend writing #6, weekend writing #5.

Weekend Writing #4

The Art of the Rewrite: Editing Your Draft

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Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

ENG-123, English Comp II, is the first class I took as a newly minted middle-aged college student. I had little idea what to expect; I’d had scant training on Brightspace, but I jumped in headfirst. The course opened for viewing, but not for turning in work, two weeks before the start date. I used that time to familiarize myself with Brightspace, set up a Word template in MLA format , and read through the syllabus and rubrics.

About ENG-123

My professor was Nannette Shultz, and she was a delight. Encouraging, complimentary, honest, and a little quirky. Professor Shultz was a stickler for grammar and spelling—unsurprising in an English instructor—but her communications with the students were always riddled with odd errors. Later, I would determine that she was likely using speech-to-text software, and that was probably the cause of the errors. It was frustrating at times, but this was a case of “do as I say, not as I do.” Professor Shultz gave me, unintentionally, the idea for my final project, a persuasive paper.

“Editors and other gatekeepers need to relax their prescriptivist tendencies and embrace descriptivism so writers’ work will be more accessible.”

Professor Shultz loved it, and we had a great back-and-forth throughout the rest of the course. I challenged her prescriptivist tendencies, and she challenged my descriptivist point of view in a way that made for a stronger paper. A valuable piece of advice she gave me early on, “You have to argue for informality within the confines and rules of a formal paper,” guided all but one of my decisions. This is how I ended the nine-page paper:

“Ending a sentence—or even an essay—with a preposition should not be something to argue about.”

The textbook wasn’t a textbook, but MindEdge software. MindEdge is something like an interactive textbook, a learning environment that is quite easy to engage and navigate. The reading wasn’t intensive, but the research was.

I spent hours upon hours trawling Shapiro Library looking for scholarly resources. ENG-123 doesn’t teach English so much as it trains students in conducting academic research, but that’s okay. The class prepares students for future courses in essential ways; it’s a 100-level class, after all.

Each assignment builds on the one before. One of the most common questions I see in the student SNHU Facebook groups is, “Do I need to start over this week? I heard about self-plagiarizing!” While the thought did cross my mind in the first week or two, the school designed the assignments to be drafts of the final project. I wrote lines in week two’s Writing Notes assignment that survived all the way to the final project.

The Final Project

My final paper for ENG-123 was nine pages long, had a Turnitin score of 7%, and was graded an A with a perfect score. I’ve made the paper available for download, and I hope I shouldn’t have to tell you not to plagiarize.

ENG-123 Final Project

I loved this class. As first experiences go, I left this course thinking that there might be something to this whole ‘online school’ thing. At the same time, it was incredibly easy, and I wondered if I was wasting time and money. I decided that while I could have tested out of the class, it was best I didn’t.

The last assignment, in week eight, is a reflection. Here, I’m sharing the final paragraphs of mine; it exists outside of the assignment proper as a note directly to Professor Shultz.

“Professor Schultz, you’re right—I probably didn’t need this class, strictly speaking. That is not to say I didn’t learn anything; I certainly did, and the dialogue about descriptivism and prescriptivism was enjoyable. The most important thing about this class was not, ironically, the class. It’s that this was my first course at SNHU, my first online college course, and my first real college course since about 1994. I needed this class to demonstrate how SNHU works; to demonstrate how online learning works.

Finally, I really do strongly recommend Semicolon by Cecelia Watson . She echoes my sentiments about language and descriptivism almost entirely but makes her points with far more eloquence than I. Most importantly, she’s a former prescriptivist herself, so the writing comes from a well-informed place.”

Final grade: A (99.03%)

Advice for Students Registered for ENG-123 at SNHU

Lightning round! Some of this is especially valuable for new students, not just ENG-123 folks.

• Don’t skimp on the discussions.
• Use the Online Writing Center if you have any doubts about your writing skills. Use it once, even if you don’t.
• You will have instant credibility with your instructor if you turn in work without split infinitives, stranded prepositions, or misplaced punctuation. Use Grammarly .
• If you’re an English & Creative Writing major, format all your work in MLA, not APA. You will have a scant handful of classes that require APA (I’ve had only one, and I’m not likely to have any more). MLA is the standard for creative writing classes.
• If your degree program skews toward APA, by all means, format your ENG-123 work in APA. The course will teach the difference in week six, but practically speaking, you’ll want to make that choice in week one, so you can properly format your work from the start.
• Don’t buy the MLA book. Everything you need to know about formatting MLA is easily accessible for free. Use the Purdue Online Writing Lab ; SNHU recommends it (pretty constantly, actually). Purdue OWL covers APA, too.
• The syllabus says your web browser needs to support Java. I confirmed with IT at the school that it doesn’t. I mentioned in my feedback that the line needs to be removed.
• Speaking of the syllabus: read it and remember what it says about things unrelated to the course. I asked a dumb question in a Facebook group in my fourth term—six classes in—about the cutoff between A and A-. Every SNHU syllabus has the answer .
• You will hate Turnitin. You shouldn’t. Be original; be creative. Think of uncommon ways to phrase things. Use ten-cent words now and then. Your instructors expect you to use big words, and those big words, along with proper grammar and punctuation, are the difference between a low Turnitin score and a high one.
• Time management is your key to success in this and every class.

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6 Responses

Hello Daniel!

Thank you so much for this helpful post! I am in this class at SNHU and I appreciate your detailed information. It has been very helpful to me.

Thanks again, Sarah

Thank you, Sarah! I’m so happy this was useful to you. Best of luck with your degree program!

Awesome paper, really HEAVY stuff, especially when (like you) you’ve been out of school for the past few decades (I use the expression last 100 years); the paper and the advise are also great. I’m a nubie (not an idiot) at SNHU and start in January, my anxiety, curiosity and yearning for knowledge into what i’m getting myself into brought me to your paper and I am truly grateful that I read it’s entirety (hope you understand). Please note it also made me laugh and gave me a sense of ignorance (for lack of a proper word), but, not in a negative manner; you gave me words that i assumed, perceived I knew their meanings, but I had to cheat and look them up in my trusty “Merriam Webster’s Dictionary and Thesaurus”, Thank you..Miguel C.

Thanks, Miguel! I’m glad you found the paper and that you could get something out of it – that’s what it’s there for! As for the dictionary and thesaurus… I don’t think there’s a writer alive who doesn’t refer to one, no matter their experience level. Best of luck at SNHU. I hope you can crush that anxiety because I’m confident you will have a great time.

Thank you! It’s been a while since, I’ve been in school, and being middle-aged, kind of makes you feel a certain way about going back to English class.

I remember the feeling well, Jessica. Just push on through, and when you get to the other side, you’ll wonder why you felt that way! We middle-aged students have a real advantage over the younger ones. Our life experience adds up to a much easier time in the introductory-level courses.

Best of luck with your program!

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More in Musings of a Middle-Aged Student

Musings of a Middle-Aged College Student

In July 2019, at age 44, I went back to school. I enrolled at Southern New Hampshire University, online, to major in English & Creative Writing with a Fiction concentration.

Southern New Hampshire University Enrollment

Southern New Hampshire University—SNHU—advertised two important things. One, it has a fantastic writing program. Two, it’s a real school. I wanted a school that’s been around for a while, a school that was brick-and-mortar long before offering online degree programs.

LIT-100: Introduction to Literature and HUM-200: Applied Humanities at SNHU

Full-time enrollment at SNHU requires two courses per term, and after my initial term, I decided I’d be able to handle a pair at a time. With a major in English & Creative Writing, this literature class would be the first of many, and I was excited. Humanities, I wasn’t too sure about.

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Eng 123 2-5 Assignment_ Writing Notes

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• Course Title ENG 123 - English Composition II
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10 Ways to Detect AI Writing Without Technology

As more of my students have submitted AI-generated work, I’ve gotten better at recognizing it.

AI-generated papers have become regular but unwelcome guests in the undergraduate college courses I teach. I first noticed an AI paper submitted last summer, and in the months since I’ve come to expect to see several per assignment, at least in 100-level classes.

I’m far from the only teacher dealing with this. Turnitin recently announced that in the year since it debuted its AI detection tool, about 3 percent of papers it reviewed were at least 80 percent AI-generated.

Just as AI has improved and grown more sophisticated over the past 9 months, so have teachers. AI often has a distinct writing style with several tells that have become more and more apparent to me the more frequently I encounter any.

Before we get to these strategies, however, it’s important to remember that suspected AI use isn’t immediate grounds for disciplinary action. These cases should be used as conversation starters with students and even – forgive the cliché – as a teachable moment to explain the problems with using AI-generated work. 

To that end, I’ve written previously about how I handled these suspected AI cases , the troubling limitations and discriminatory tendencies of existing AI detectors , and about what happens when educators incorrectly accuse students of using AI . 

With those caveats firmly in place, here are the signs I look for to detect AI use from my students. 

1. How to Detect AI Writing: The Submission is Too Long 

When an assignment asks students for one paragraph and a student turns in more than a page, my spidey sense goes off. 

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Almost every class does have one overachieving student who will do this without AI, but that student usually sends 14 emails the first week and submits every assignment early, and most importantly, while too long, their assignment is often truly well written. A student who suddenly overproduces raises a red flag.

2. The Answer Misses The Mark While Also Being Too Long

Being long in and of itself isn’t enough to identify AI use, but it's often overlong assignments that have additional strange features that can make it suspicious. 

For instance, the assignment might be four times the required length yet doesn’t include the required citations or cover page. Or it goes on and on about something related to the topic but doesn’t quite get at the specifics of the actual question asked. 

3. AI Writing is Emotionless Even When Describing Emotions 

If ChatGPT was a musician it would be Kenny G or Muzak. As it stands now, AI writing is the equivalent of verbal smooth jazz or grey noise. ChatGPT, for instance, has this very peppy positive vibe that somehow doesn’t convey actual emotion. 

One assignment I have asks students to reflect on important memories or favorite hobbies. You immediately sense the hollowness of ChatGPT's response to this kind of prompt. For example, I just told ChatGPT I loved skateboarding as a kid and asked it for an essay describing that. Here’s how ChatGPT started: 

As a kid, there was nothing more exhilarating than the feeling of cruising on my skateboard. The rhythmic sound of wheels against pavement, the wind rushing through my hair, and the freedom to explore the world on four wheels – skateboarding was not just a hobby; it was a source of unbridled joy.

You get the point. It’s like an extended elevator jazz sax solo but with words.  

4. Cliché Overuse

Part of the reason AI writing is so emotionless is that its cliché use is, well, on steroids.

Take the skateboarding example in the previous entry. Even in the short sample, we see lines such as “the wind rushing through my hair, and the freedom to explore the world on four wheels.” Students, regardless of their writing abilities, always have more original thoughts and ways of seeing the world than that. If a student actually wrote something like that, we’d encourage them to be more authentic and truly descriptive.

Of course, with more prompt adjustments, ChatGPT and other AI’s tools can do better, but the students using AI for assignments rarely put in this extra time.

5. The Assignment Is Submitted Early

I don’t want to cast aspersions on those true overachievers who get their suitcases packed a week before vacation starts, finish winter holiday shopping in July, and have already started saving for retirement, but an early submission may be the first signal that I’m about to read some robot writing.

For example, several students this semester submitted an assignment the moment it became available. That is unusual, and in all of these cases, their writing also exhibited other stylistic points consistent with AI writing.

Warning: Use this tip with caution as it is also true that many of my best students have submitted assignments early over the years.

6. The Setting Is Out of Time

AI image generators frequently have little tells that signal the AI model that created it doesn’t understand what the world actually looks like — think extra fingers on human hands or buildings that don’t really follow the laws of physics.

When AI is asked to write fiction or describe something from a student’s life, similar mistakes often occur. Recently, a short story assignment in one of my classes resulted in several stories that took place in a nebulous time frame that jumped between modern times and the past with no clear purpose.

If done intentionally this could actually be pretty cool and give the stories a kind of magical realism vibe, but in these instances, it was just wonky and out-of-left-field, and felt kind of alien and strange. Or, you know, like a robot had written it.

7. Excessive Use of Lists and Bullet Points  

Here are some reasons that I suspect students are using AI if their papers have many lists or bullet points: 

1. ChatGPT and other AI generators frequently present information in list form even though human authors generally know that’s not an effective way to write an essay. 

2. Most human writers will not inherently write this way, especially new writers who often struggle with organizing information.

3. While lists can be a good way to organize information, presenting more complex ideas in this manner can be .…

4 … annoying. 

5. Do you see what I mean? 

6. (Yes, I know, it's ironic that I'm complaining about this here given that this story is also a list.)

8. It’s Mistake-Free 

I’ve criticized ChatGPT’s writing here yet in fairness it does produce very clean prose that is, on average, more error-free than what is submitted by many of my students. Even experienced writers miss commas, have long and awkward sentences, and make little mistakes – which is why we have editors. ChatGPT’s writing isn’t too “perfect” but it’s too clean.  

9. The Writing Doesn’t Match The Student’s Other Work  

Writing instructors know this inherently and have long been on the lookout for changes in voice that could be an indicator that a student is plagiarizing work. 

AI writing doesn't really change that. When a student submits new work that is wildly different from previous work, or when their discussion board comments are riddled with errors not found in their formal assignments, it's time to take a closer look. 

10. Something Is Just . . . Off 

The boundaries between these different AI writing tells blur together and sometimes it's a combination of a few things that gets me to suspect a piece of writing. Other times it’s harder to tell what is off about the writing, and I just get the sense that a human didn’t do the work in front of me. 

I’ve learned to trust these gut instincts to a point. When confronted with these more subtle cases, I will often ask a fellow instructor or my department chair to take a quick look (I eliminate identifying student information when necessary). Getting a second opinion helps ensure I’ve not gone down a paranoid “my students are all robots and nothing I read is real” rabbit hole. Once a colleague agrees something is likely up, I’m comfortable going forward with my AI hypothesis based on suspicion alone, in part, because as mentioned previously, I use suspected cases of AI as conversation starters rather than to make accusations. 

Again, it is difficult to prove students are using AI and accusing them of doing so is problematic. Even ChatGPT knows that. When I asked it why it is bad to accuse students of using AI to write papers, the chatbot answered: “Accusing students of using AI without proper evidence or understanding can be problematic for several reasons.” 

Then it launched into a list. 

• Best Free AI Detection Sites
• My Student Was Submitting AI Papers. Here's What I Did
• She Wrote A Book About AI in Education. Here’s How AI Helped

Erik Ofgang is a Tech & Learning contributor. A journalist,  author  and educator, his work has appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Smithsonian, The Atlantic, and Associated Press. He currently teaches at Western Connecticut State University’s MFA program. While a staff writer at Connecticut Magazine he won a Society of Professional Journalism Award for his education reporting. He is interested in how humans learn and how technology can make that more effective. 

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