Review Guide

Your final exam is worth 10% of your semester grade.

Your final exam will have three parts.  The first part will be on argument.  The second part will be on poetry.  The third part will be an essay prompt on either argument or poetry analysis—your pick (but you can’t see the test first and then pick).  Please read the following so you have a better understanding of what you will be tested on and what you need to study.

PART ONE—Argumentative Writing

In this section you will read 2 short passages from argumentative essays.  Your job will be to identify underlined portions of the writing (e.g., is it a thesis?  context?  a warrant?) OR identify the purpose of the underlined portion (e.g., insert doubt, explain evidence, etc.).  This section will be multiple choice and/or fill-in-the-blank.

WHAT TO STUDY:  Review argumentative terminology.

PART TWO—Poetry

In this section you will answer questions asking you to identify literary techniques in lines of poetry, to mark the rhythm and/or identify the meter of lines of poetry, and identify mood and/or tone in poetry.  This section will be multiple choice and/or fill-in-the-blank, and (as previously stated) involve some rhythm marking.

WHAT TO STUDY:  Marking rhythm and meter. Poetic and literary devices.  Don’t forget irony.  Look over the lists of mood and tone words and be prepared to know as many as possible (in terms of what they mean).

PART THREE—Essay (student choice of prompt)

For this section, you will pick to either respond to an “essay” prompt involving argumentative writing or poetry analysis.  You must decide which prompt you want BEFORE seeing the actual test prompts.  This means you need to determine which kind of essay you will be better at.  Read the information below as you prepare to make this decision.

Argument Prompt:  If you choose this prompt, you will read a small passage from a story or a short poem.  Then you will read part of an argument about that text.  You will need to revise the argument to make it stronger while keeping to the argument’s thesis.

WHAT TO STUDY:  Everything you know about putting a solid argument together.

Poetry Analysis Prompt:  If you choose this prompt, you will receive a poem to read and analyze.  You must write a mini-analysis of the poem’s meaning.

WHAT TO STUDY:  Understand “theme,” literal versus metaphorical meaning, and poetic techniques.  Read over and study the sample mini-analyses from our work with [1(a].  You may also want to check out some of the discussion on the Collaboratory as part of your review for this.