Tips for the Final

Here is a list of things you need to do in your final exam to do well, in no specific order.

• Answer the question. 
• If you ignore some aspect of the prompt you will be dinged down for it.
• Be sure to address both passages
• You will be given two passages to compare, contrast, and synthesize into single idea, your position.  You must address both ideas.  Note that the passages will not necessarily take contrary positions on a topic.  Don't assume that they do.
• Don't quote the whole passage or even large chunks of the passage.  That just looks like you're trying to fill space.  Instead, identify individual sentences that you want to specifically respond to in each passage.  Quote those individual sentences, or better yet, parts of sentences, so that you can integrate them into your own sentences.
• Use more than just the passages given to you for support.
• Essays that get higher scores tend to be the ones that not only bring in specific support from the outside world, but convincingly tie it back to the prompt.
• Go back and proofread.
• You have 30 minutes to prepare and 60 minutes to write, so there should be plenty of time to go back and correct a few spelling mistakes here and there.  Believe me, doing so will up your score.
• Specificity is knowledge.
• Don't talk about people, or a child, or a guy, or some person.  Talk about Harry Potter, or Bob down the street, or Barack Obama, or someone specific.  The more specific your examples the stronger they are as evidence.
• A good mixture of examples is better than a lot of the same example.
• Don't repeat yourself.  Try for a good lit example, a good movie example, a good historical example, a good personal example, and a good use of the passages included in the prompt.
• Avoid hypotheticals and rely on reality
• If you begin an argument with if, it might just be a bad argument.  While that is a common structure for logic (if this is true, then that is true), it does not make an argument.  To make that an argument, you first have to prove that your premise is true, and that can take too much time that you don't have.  Simply show the world for how it is, and not how it should be to support your argument.
• Write more than five paragraphs.
• Seriously.  Most of the readers of your essay have a loathing of the five paragraph structure, and if they see only five, it is possible it may induce an irrational response.  Throw in a sixth paragraph.  Each paragraph should address a specific idea with the sentences in each paragraph building the argument for that idea.  
• Development is the key
• Chances are your two pages single spaced or four pages double are not going to do the trick.  You should have between four and five examples to support your position clearly tied back to the prompt.  
• Anticipate counter arguments.
• Give yourself at least one paragraph in which you consider and respond to a potential counter argument to your position.  This shows the reader that you're thinking critically on the issue, and not just plowing forward with narrow focus. 
• When five minutes is called, jump to the conclusion.
• Seriously, one of the things the readers will look for is completeness.  When I call five minutes you better be on a conclusion or moving toward it.  Simply ending your essay is not a conclusion. A good conclusion explains why your position is important and gives a satisfying close to the essay. 
• Unless you are using specific information gathered by anthropologists about the ways early humans lived, Cavemen make poor argumentative examples.
• Seriously, no cavemen.

Passages for Essay #5

"Realizing that we are divided on the things that constitute a true nation -- blood and soil, tradition and faith, history and heroes -- intellectuals have sought to construct, in lieu of the real nation, the nation of the heart that is passing away, an artificial nation, a nation of the mind, an ideological nation, a creedal nation, united by a belief in the new trinity: diversity, democracy, and equality. As Christianity is purged from the public schools, this civil religion is taught in its stead. The dilemma of those who conjured up this civil religion and creedal nation, liberals and neoconservatives, is that it has no roots and does not touch the heart. Americans will not send their sons to fight and die for such watery abstractions" ~Pat Buchanan, Deconstructing America (472)

"Of the four models of American ethnic relations, the one that I believe offers the best hope for a just and cohesive society is a cultural pluralism that is fully inclusive and based on the free choices of individuals to construct or reconstruct their own ethnic identities. We are still far from achieving the degree of racial and ethnic tolerance that realization of such an ideal requires. But with the demographic shift that is transforming the overwhelmingly Euro-American population of thirty or forty years ago into one that is much more culturally and phenotypically heterogeneous, a more democratic form of intergroup relations is a likely prospect, unless there is a desperate reversion to overt ethnic heirarchicalism by the shrinking Euro-American majority." ~George M. Fredrickson, Models of American Ethnic Relations: A Historical Perspective (459).

"Whether you describe it as the dawning of a post-racial age or just the end of white America, we're approaching a profound demographic tipping point. According to an August 2008 report by the U.S. Census Bureau, those groups currently categorized as racial minorities -- blacks and Hispanics, East Asians and South Asians -- will account for the majority of the U.S. population by the year 2042. Among Americans under the age of eighteen, the shift is projected to take place in 2023, which means that every child born in the United States from here on out will belong to the first post-white generation." ~Hua Hsu, The End of White America? (499).

"Yet, [Hurricane] Katrina offers profound insights into how race operates in American society, insight into how various facts about our social life are racially interpreted through frames. As a result of racial frames, black people are both visible (as criminals) and invisible (as victims). Racial frames both capture and displace us -- discursively and materially. More than shaping whether we see black people as criminal or innocent, perpetrator or victim, these frames shape whether we see black people at all. Where have all the black people gone, long time passing? It is not hyperbole to say that post-Katrina black New Orleanians have become a part of an emerging social category: the disappeared." ~Cheryl I Harris and Devon W. Carbado, Loot of Find: Fact or Frame? (433).