Grading Criteria

Your grade will be based on a review of your portfolio, collected at the midterm point and at the end of the semester. You will have submitted about 25 pages of revised work, not including rough drafts, group work, or peer revision. You can assume that the grade will break down as follows:

• Feature Story (and preparatory work): 35%
  
  
• Book Review (and preparatory work): 20%
  
  
• Interview Story (and preparatory work): 25%
  
  
• Online Review: 5%
  
  
• News Brief: 5%
  
  
• Group Presentation (and preparatory work): 5%
  
  
• Other discretionary issues (attendance, preparation, engagement with the material): 5%

Grading Policies:

Papers are due in class on the day that they are due. If you turn them in late, they will depreciate in value accordingly. Spelling errors, grammatical glitches, wordiness, blatant discrepancies from the truth, and formatting problems will count against you.

In general, your stories, reviews, and articles will be evaluated as follows:

A = great story, worthy of publication. Great writing, interesting approach, correct format

B = good story, worthy of publication with editing. Good reporting, but not as interesting as an A, correct format

C = okay story, requires extensive work before publication. Wordy or redundant recounting of the issues, or scant and
superficial treatment of the topic

NP = dull, sloppy, boring, misses the point, poor grammar or organization. Don't even think of publication.

All assignments are required. Missing one means failure. A nonpassing assignment is better than no assignment.

Plagiarism is against the law. We will go over plagiarism in great detail, and I will be checking any suspicious work with our online bloodhound service. Don't do it. Cite any information you use from any source whatsoever, and never use someone's exact words without quotation marks.