Josephine Ho (Office Hours: Tu 1-2, Wed 10-12)
This course is designed for those students who are interested in pursuing a career in academic research and writing. I am going to presume that students already got the basics of expository writing, and I am going to concentrate on several key areas of expertise in this course as listed in the tentative schedule. Central to the course would be the question of plagiarism, which I believe is not a simple crime nor an easy way out of a difficult task but the starting point of learning a complicated set of conventions as well as an important lesson in processing information and achieving independent thinking--both are vital skills for an academic career. (And as we sort through the dynamics of plagiarism, we will try to build up a website on the problem of plagiarism for National Central University as a side product.) Students are required to actively surf the internet and learn about how other institutions of higher education have dealt with problems of thesis-writing and plagiarism. It would be through consulting these other resources that we formulate our own understanding of academic production. That, in itself, is a practice in research methodology. In the end, the lessons learned and the work produced will be used to construct our new website on writing academic papers.