English 1130 Final Essay Exam 3 hours

The purpose of this exam is to demonstrate your skill at crafting an argument essay that offers a

persuasive intervention into an existing debate. The exam asks you to situate yourself in response to

two medium length texts.

For this exam, you will receive the instructions in advance and you will prepare at home. One of the

texts will be provided in advance, and one will be provided at the exam. You will have 3 hours to write

your essay.

You must print and bring the article and these instructions with you for reference during the exam.

No notes are allowed at the exam (except very minimal marginalia in your text, such as the definition of

a word), but you can prepare at home by reading the text provided carefully and thinking about what

your own response might be.

Strong essays will make use of all of the skills at critical reading and writing you have been practicing all

semester: consider organization, rhetorical ‘moves,’ logic, levels of diction, and ways of responding to

other writers’ ideas. Your essay should use proper parenthetical citations in MLA, and a separate works

cited page with alphabetical entries, but the works cited entries do not need to be in full MLA format.

Note: you must write legibly if you want your exam to be marked. Please double space and write

clearly. If I can’t read it, I can’t give it points.

Instructions

Read “The World is Flat” by Thomas L. Friedman (available online) and one other medium-length piece

that will be provided at the exam. Write a persuasive essay that summarizes the debate represented

by these two articles, and then offers your own critical response. Your own opinion may agree and/or

disagree with the positions in the two texts, or may offer another angle on the question, but it must

engage in precise, nuanced thought. Support all claims with evidence and reasoning, and use

organizational strategies to structure your paper effectively. Use MLA format for in-text citations, and

include a simplified works cited page.