Welcome to ENGL 303! One thing you will discover this semester is that proofreading multimodal projects is difficult, perhaps even more difficult than proofreading a paper. Even businesses with hundreds of employees make errors in their products, both big, service interrupting ones and small, embarrassing ones. For this reason, it is good to seek the input and feedback of others as you work on your projects to make sure that they meet professional standards for quality.

In this spirit, I would like you to help me catch typos and errors on this site. Software corporations sometimes pay bounties—usually cash prizes—to individuals or companies that discover critical bugs in their programs. I can’t pay you cash, but I will offer you the chance to earn extra points on your final grade for finding typos and internal errors on this course site.

Here’s how it will work:

• I will add 1 point to your final grade for each error you find on this course site. I am capping the bounty at 2 errors/points per person. The deadline for claiming a bounty is 5 p.m. on 5/1.
• The error has to be by me, not one of your classmates, and should be either a misspelling (“their” instead of “there”), syntax error (“all of the the projects”), grammatical or punctuation errors (a sentence fragment or comma splice), or internal error (a due date on the assignments page is different from the due date listed on the schedule or a link on the site is broken). Errors in style and taste are not covered by this program.
• The way you will claim your bounty is by posting a description of the error and a link to it as a reply to the “Syllabus typos” topic on the Syllabus and course site questions forum. These posts should be separate from your first week posts on this forum described here.
• You cannot receive points for a typo someone else already found, so if you want to claim a bounty you should sign up for an account and read the course materials sooner rather than later.

Happy hunting!

Image: Screen capture from Apple’s App Store