The instructions for your final exam are provided in the Final Exam Prompt:
Your final essay is another argument. In this assignment, you will argue that you have or have not developed as a writer. In this essay, you will be looking at your own writings for this class and analyzing how you feel you’ve applied what we’ve learned in class to your writing process, your experience in this course, and how you changed as a writer.
Think about your writing process and how you’ve become more aware of your own unique ways of writing. Has your writing changed during this course? You should think about strategies that you learned in class, suggestions you received—what worked, what didn’t?
The Essay
In your final essay (800-1000 words), you will need to cite examples and quotes from your essays as proof of your increased writing knowledge. This will give your audience a clear indication that you understand how the changes you’ve made affect the quality of your writing.
Certainly, not all stories have storybook endings: there’s a chance that you have improved some, but you still don’t consider yourself a great writer. You may think that you’ve noticed some small improvements, but simply aren’t convinced that your skills developed as you thought they might or expected them to. That’s okay. You don’t have to pretend that you’ve made phenomenal improvements over the course of this course, if, in fact, you haven’t.
Most of us, when growing academically, find the experience mixed. You likely have made improvements, and you likely still have room for additional development. Thus, for this essay, be honest, sincere, thoughtful, and specific and you will succeed with your argument about the degree to which you improved in your development.
Your goal is to argue, using examples from your own work, about the growth you’ve experienced as a writer this session.
How to Prepare
Define how you think you’ve changed as a writer this session by thinking about these questions.
How did your writing change during this course?
What do you know about your writing process/growth? What kind of writer were you before entering this course? What kind of writer are you now? How do you describe your own writing process? How has your process changed since taking this class? What do you still need to work on?
How does your writing/thinking at the end of the course compare to where you started? Examples?
How do your essays show the changes you’ve noticed? What kind of proof can you use from these essays to back up your argument? Examples?
What were some of the most influential ideas/activities you encountered this session? What concepts are most valuable to you? Why? How will you use these concepts in the future?
What did you conclude about your writing process/growth?
Support your Argument: Specific Examples & Quotes
You could start the essay with a statement defining how you would describe yourself as a writer, a critical thinker, and rhetorician, as compared to the first day of class or the first essay. To help you develop the argument, you could
Include specific anecdotes, examples from your papers and your personal experiences while writing this session.
Use quotes to back up the points you make about your development as a writer. You can use quotes from peer reviews, notes, class writings, graded essays, but you MUST quote from your own work several times.
Take this week to review comments on each of your projects. Make notes on areas you were pleased with as well as areas you struggled with. Use quotations, as appropriate, from others’ comments to you and from your own work.
To cite from your work, document it by including the name of the essay, the type of assignment, date, and the page number in a References page. For example, if Janet Smith cites from her values essay entitled “Alphabetizing Elephants” submitted on July 12, 2020, her citation would look like this.
Smith, J. (2020). Alphabetizing elephants. The Values Essay.
If Janet used a source from her Classical Argument entitled “Balancing Work and Exercise,” her References page would look like this.
Smith, J. (2020a). Alphabetizing elephants. The Values Essay.
Smith, J. (2020b). Balancing work and exercise. The Classical Argument Essay.