Final Exam Review—Tips and Suggestions

The exam is worth 300 points and is in three parts, each worth 100 points.  For parts one and two, you may prepare a notecard as a study guide.  Part three, the long answer essay, will be given to you in advance, and can be considered an "open book" question.

• Part One: Multiple Choice—10 questions, 10 points each.  These cover the introductory portions of chapters from the Foss text, essays from the Perl text, and the notes on the "19th and 20th Century Reading Packet," which are linked to the web page.
• Part Two: Short Answer—here, you'll respond to two of three prompts, each worth 50 points.  You'll be given a brief description of an idea for a rhetorical study, and you'll be asked to select the methodology that best suits it, and to justify your selection.
• Part Three: Long Answer—the prompt for the long-answer essay is linked to the course page, under the date for the final exam.  You may consider it a take-home exam.  If you are too swamped to write the exam prior to our scheduled exam time, there should be ample time in our exam period for you to write it.  If you choose this option, you may bring your course materials to the exam, in order to write the long answer essay as an "open book" question.  However, you'll have to turn in sections one and two prior to opening your materials to work on section three.  

In preparing for parts one and two, you'll want to review the essays from the Perl text, the first part of each chapter from the Foss text, and the web notes on the "19th and 20th Century Reading Packet" (for the long answer essay, you'll probably want to refer to the actual packet, but for the first two parts of the test, only material from the web notes will be covered).  Some suggestions:

• Identify the main uses for the methodologies from Foss.  What's Narrative Criticism good for, as opposed to Pentadic Criticism?
• Make sure you have a working understanding of key terms from each chapter.  Make lists.  Make up your own exam questions.  Make flashcards.  I know it sounds childish, but these kinds of active strategies are incredibly important in helping you get comfortable with material that you're trying to learn.
• In the Perl text, learn the structure and purposes of each essay well enough that you can accurately and distinctively summarize each one.  This would include a) understanding the purpose of the study (for instance, the Faigley essay responds to the criticism that Comp/Rhet is too technical), b) if the essay is based on a study (i.e., Perl, or Flower and Hayes), recall the methodology of the study, c) recall the main points of the study (for instance, recalling that the Emig chapter was a "review of literature," which systematically described the traditional sources of knowledge about writing (and recalling what each of those sources was) and then showed why those sources didn't really shed light on what students actually do when they write), and d) recall the conclusion reached in the article (for instance, that after debunking the scientistic separation of the personal from the abstract, Ann Berthoff argues that we need to consider writing as a unified process of _forming_ abstract knowledge through the imaginative aspects of writing).  Once you can fully, conversationally, summarize each of the essays, you're pretty much ready.  You can use your notecard to jot down any particular points that seem crucial, or things you find difficult to remember.
• In the notes from the reading packet, you'll find useful material on two levels: 1) you'll find cultural/historical context information that shows how Comp/Rhet has related to 19th & 20th century history, and, 2) you'll find brief characterizations of the work of a number of important thinkers. For parts one and two of the exam, it's primarily the latter of these that you'll be concerned with.  While the long answer essay will ask you to summarize the development of Composition pedagogy since the inception of Composition, the multiple choice questions will test your ability to associate the name of a key thinker, listed on the notes page, with his or her primary contribution to Comp/Rhet.  Here, again, flash cards or other active strategies for familiarizing yourself with the material would probably work well.