I know you’re all busy working on/thinking about peer review for the second short rhetorical analysis (as you should be doing!), but the final is coming along very soon, too. So, what are your thoughts on that? What sorts of questions can you imagine including?
A couple of thoughts to get you going:
- As I mentioned at the beginning of the term and as clear in the syllabus, this final is actually worth a fair amount, 30% of the final grade, or the same as the two short rhetorical analysis essays. So for those of you who have been in some of my previous classes, the stakes of this final are quite a bit higher than they are for courses like English 516.
- It’s a comprehensive final– everything we’ve read and discussed is fair game.
- I haven’t decided this yet, but the format will probably involve four essay questions, one (or two? I’m not sure) longer questions that everyone has to answer, and two (or three) shorter essay questions where there will be a choice of options.
- Regardless, the length of these essay answers will be strictly enforced and the aim is for preciseness in language (e.g., not a lot of “filler” here) with lots of citations/references to readings. The long essays will probably be capped at 500 words (about 2 typed pages) and the shorter essays will probably capped at 250 words.
- Finally, while I make no promises about using any of your suggestions for test questions or areas of the test, I would say you’re better off making suggestions to me than not. So suggest away.
What do you all think? What questions do you have about the process, and what questions might you want to see on the final?
I have two questions about what to expect on the exam:
Should we expect questions similar to our rhetorical analysis essays where we show our understanding of a theory by applying it to something new?
Will we be expected to compare/synthesize multiple texts for one question?
I think the short answer to both questions is yes, Kayla. The longer questions are ones where I tend to ask you to synthesize between different readings for the class, while the shorter ones are about more specific explanations of one or two essays, or perhaps a concept.
But you won’t need to have any sort of out of class research at all.
I would have one long essay and two short ones would showcase our mastery of rhetoric,
I would appreciate 1 long and 2 short.
Um, that isn’t what I’m really asking, folks. As I said above, I am debating with myself some of the issues of how many questions to ask, but I’ll decide that. What I’m asking for is what sorts of questions do you think would be good questions.
Remember this, too: the final is worth as much as both of the essays, so the stakes here are a little higher than I have done in the past. So, you know, suggesting stuff like “make it easy” is probably not going to get y’all too far…
I definitely support the idea of having one of the questions ask us to do something similar to the essays we have done– taking a concept discussed in class and applying it to a practice, item, etc. in society. I also think that one of the questions should ask us to use some of the content discussed in the book about the more foundational concepts of rhetorical theory– perhaps defining some of the terms in our own words, applying it to this or that, etc. Lastly, I would like one of the questions (perhaps just one of the short questions) to pull from the readings at the end of the term on visual rhetoric. We haven’t really gotten too much of a chance to dwell on those and they were actually very interesting to me.
I agree with the questions about visual rhetoric and even the gender stuff. Since they were the last things we covered it would be nice to talk about them a bit more indepth.
I would like to see a short-answer question along the lines of “which article do you find most troubling and why?” There were several times this semester when I was discouraged after reading about trends, and especially with the gender issues we just finished up, this would be a chance to relate them to the industry at large.