---
title: ENGL 478
author: Issa Rice
created: 2015-06-11
date: 2015-07-13
status: notes
belief: emotional
---

This is my course review for English 478 at University of Washington.
I took the course in [spring 2015] with [Bojan Belić][belic].
The course is [jointly offered] with SLAV 470, SLAV 570, CHID 498, and
LING 480. The course also has the title "What's in a language name? The
case of Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian".

[spring 2015]: spring-2015-at-the-university-of-washington
[belic]: https://slavic.washington.edu/people/bojan-belic
[jointly offered]: https://depts.washington.edu/registra/curriculum/jointCourses.php

I took the course because of the new [diversity requirement] at
UW.^[This requirement seems to be yet another disservice to students, forcing them to take even more useless courses than they already have to. The [general education](http://www.benkuhn.net/gened) requirements (which can mostly be fulfilled with AP/IB credits) were already bad enough.] I probably would have waited until later to satisfy this
requirement, but a friend invited me to take the course with him, so I
obliged.

[diversity requirement]: https://web.archive.org/web/20150210074236/https://www.washington.edu/uaa/advising/general-education-requirements/diversity/

# Content

The course was based on a series of readings (from a course packet one
must purchase at the [Rams Copy Center](http://www.ramscopy.com/) for around $20). It mostly centered around the [language planning](!w) policies of the [West South Slavic](!w) region and languages, specifically Serbian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Bosnian.

# Lectures

The lectures in general felt like a huge waste of time. At the beginning of each class, the professor would take attendance, but in doing so, would name each of the absent students; in addition, if a student came to class late, they were interrogated as to where they were, why there were late, and so forth. This tended to waste a lot of time each class period.

# Take-home projects

Throughout the course, there were two take-home projects. The ones we did were the lexical analysis of Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian; and the article review.

## Lexical analysis

## Article review

# Grading

The grading for the two projects in the course seemed extremely lenient;
I got a 98/100  on one (lexical analysis) and 100/100 on the other
(article review). The syllabus that we used seems to indicate that there
also used to be a presentation instead of one of the papers.

I'm not sure what I got on the attendance \& participation^[I ended up missing two lectures during the quarter. I spoke up maybe a little less than once per lecture, which was more than average, but there still were several students who participated much more frequently than I did.] and final portions, but given that my final grade in the course was good, it couldn't have been too bad.