Suggestions for Writing Your Final Exam
Narrative
Obviously, the easiest way to respond to this question is simply to tell a story. You could elect to pick one particular writing assignment, tell the story of how you wrote this assignment, and use it to illustrate how you are different as a writer today than you were at the beginning of the semester. But there are many other organizational plans which I'll summarize for you here. Find one that works for you...
Five Paragraph Plan
The Five Paragraph Plan is an excellent way to pull an essay together quickly, yet give it the feeling that it is very well organized. Here's a possible outline for such an essay:
| Introduction | Describe yourself as a writer. Explain what sorts of writing you've done in the past, what kinds of success you've had as a writer, how you feel about your writing. Then, offer your purpose statement which mentions three ways that you've changed as a writer as a result of this class. |
| Body | Discuss each of the three ways you've changed as a writer, in the order you mention these ways in your purpose statement. For each paragraph start with a sentence that repeats the idea from the purpose statement in its own sentence. Then explain how the class has helped you improve or change. |
| Conclusion | Use your conclusion to review how you think of yourself as a writer now. What successes or failures have you had this semester? How do you generally think differently now than you did at the start of the semester? What assumptions do you hold about writing now that you didn't at the beginning of the semester. |
An assignment which asks you to explain how you've changed as a writer sounds a great deal like a process essay as well. You could begin a process essay much as you begin the Five Paragraph essay, but the middle will look different. Consider this outline:
| Introduction | Describe yourself as a writer. Explain what sorts of writing you've done in the past, what kinds of success you've had as a writer, how you feel about your writing. Then, offer your purpose statement which briefly describes how you've changed as a writer, perhaps mentioning in one sentence what the process was like. |
| Body | Take each of the essays or projects you worked on, or each of the class room activities, in order, and explain what you learned by doing that activity or assignment. A process essay is very much a "first this, then that, then something else" kind of essay. You go in order from beginning to end. So the middle of this essay would reflect a series of steps or processes you went through. |
| Conclusion | Use your conclusion to review how you think of yourself as a writer now. What successes or failures have you had this semester? How do you generally think differently now than you did at the start of the semester? What assumptions do you hold about writing now that you didn't at the beginning of the semester? |
| Introduction | Describe yourself as a writer. Explain what sorts of writing you've done in the past, what kinds of success you've had as a writer, how you feel about your writing. Then, offer your purpose statement which mentions the points (3-5) on which you want to compare yourself before and after or three assumptions you had about writing that have changed, or three strategies you have improved. |
| Body | For each point you want to
make, you might write
like this: Before this class I thought that ..... but now I know that
........ If you had four major changes to discuss, you'd write four
such sentences and discuss them. If you took this approach, the middle
of your essay would have several sections, one for each point you want to
make.
An alternative to the same plan is to put all the "before's" together. Before this class began, I thought writers..... But now I understand that ..... If you take this approach, the middle of your essay would have only two sections, a before, and an after. |
| Conclusion | Use your conclusion to review how you think of yourself as a writer now. What successes or failures have you had this semester? How do you generally think differently now than you did at the start of the semester? What assumptions do you hold about writing now that you didn't at the beginning of the semester? |
Cause-Effect
An essay like this could easily fall into the cause-effect model. In this model, you'd explain how something that happened in class caused a change in your writing or in the way you think about writing.
| Introduction | Describe yourself as a writer. Explain what sorts of writing you've done in the past, what kinds of success you've had as a writer, how you feel about your writing. Then, offer your purpose statement which briefly explains how the writing class caused (or hindered, if we're being honest) your growth as a writer. |
| Body | In the body of your essay discuss some aspect of the class, then explain how it caused you to change how you write or how you think about writing or how you think about yourself as a writer. |
| Conclusion | Use your conclusion to review how you think of yourself as a writer now. What successes or failures have you had this semester? How do you generally think differently now than you did at the start of the semester? What assumptions do you hold about writing now that you didn't at the beginning of the semester? |