ENC1101 ONLINE FINAL Exam FALL 2022
OVERVIEW:
For your final exam, you will be required to write ONE more essay, this one at least 600 words in length. This assignment, although it is being given to you all as online students, is instead meant to approximate an in-class essay. As a “pseudo”- in class essay: it doesn’t require heavy outside research, and I recommend you don’t spend more than 2-3 hours writing the first draft, treating it like a timed assignment. However, you SHOULD read over it, at least twice, reading it out loud to yourself before submitting it.
You have two BROAD options for your essay.
OPTION 1 will ask you to write a narrative; a self-reflective essay on what you’ve learned from the course. In OPTION 1, you will not be required and are recommended against using outside sources, other than whatever is in your own mind. There will be 3-5 prompts for you to choose from. CHOOSE ONLY ONE PROMPT. Make sure your essay’s thesis (main argument) answers the question asked by the prompt. You must underline your thesis or you will lose 5 points.
OPTION 2 will ask you to write a more argumentative essay, similar to essays 2 and 3. OPTION 2 will ask you to make an argument after reading a short article, which you can then use as evidence, in addition to your own knowledge and experience, to craft your argument. You SHOULD NOT USE ANY OUTSIDE SOURCES for this prompt, other than the article I provide to you. For this prompt you are required to effectively introduce the source provided and give a quote from the article provided. OR YOU WILL LOSE 5 points. You must also underline your thesis or you will lose 5 points
Each option has several sub-prompts. Whichever option you choose, you should only address ONE prompt from that option. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO ANSWER ALL OF THE PROMPTS, OR YOUR ESSAY WILL AUTOMATICALLY FAIL .
As always, please feel free to email me with questions. I’ve provided a template at the end of this document, to help you.
Your final edited document should be uploaded to the appropriate dropbox by 11:59pm on Saturday, 10 Decemerber 2022. Late essays will not be accepted (barring contacting me to explain your issue). Do contact me, again, if you run into ANY issues.
OPTION 1:
Please choose one of the following prompts. Then, indicate which prompt you’ve chosen, and write an essay of at least 500 words in length answering the prompt given. You must underline your thesis or you will lose 5 points. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO ANSWER ALL OF THE PROMPTS, OR YOUR ESSAY WILL AUTOMATICALLY FAIL .
As this is meant to approximate an in class final exam, I recommend you don’t spend more than 2-3 hours, total, working on your first draft. I also recommend you then take at least a day, before reading it again, preferably out loud to yourself or someone else, and editing it.
Your answer should include a central argument, evidence to support your point, based on your experiences in the course, and explanations of how and why your evidence supports your argument.
Your answer should be typed and follow MLA formatting requirements, or it will lose points. It should use times new roman 12 point font, double spaced, with paragraphs being indented ½”. You should not need to, and for this option I recommend against using outside sources, although, if you feel it is necessary, you can.
Prompt 1A: What is the single most significant thing you learned this semester, how did you learn it, and why was it most significant?
Prompt 1B: Describe for future students who might take this class the process for how to receive the best possible grade in this course, based on your own successes and failures.
Prompt 1C: Argue for your reader how you’ve changed as a writer and a person throughout the semester, based on your experiences in this class.
Prompt 1D: Which essay was most beneficial to you and your learning experience, and why?
OPTION 2:
Please choose one of the following prompts (keeping in mind each prompt is paired with an article). Then, indicate which prompt you’ve chosen, and write an essay of at least 500 words in length answering the prompt given.
Please know: you are making an argument. You should treat this as a baby research paper assignment, but you’re given the source for your research paper, the provided article, and other than that you have your own knowledge and experience as evidence. You SHOULD NOT do any other outside research.
As this is meant to approximate an in class final exam, I recommend you don’t spend more than 2-3 hours, total, working on your first draft. I also recommend you then take at least a day, before reading it again, preferably out loud to yourself or someone else, and editing it.
You DO NOT HAVE to do a works cited page.
You MUST include at least one quote in your body paragraphs from the essay provided, or lose 5 points. You must also underline your thesis statement, or lose 5 points.
You also should use your personal experiences and personal knowledge of the world, and it is 100% ok to use the word “I”.
OPTION 2A: ART
Prompt: Read the following article and write an argumentative essay establishing your response to the question: What is art? Be sure to include and reference the question, in making your definition, of whether or not the glasses themselves, left on the floor, should be considered art. Underline your thesis. Include one direct quote.
Article:
|
“Museum responds to ‘abandoned glasses as art’ prank, sees the funny side” By Friday 27 May 2016 Two teenagers took the perennial “I could have made that” response to modern art to its logical conclusion this week, sticking a pair of glasses in front of a sign at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Arts |
.
Pictures they took of people admiring and photographing the unremarkable glasses swiftly went viral, and the MoMA really had to respond.
Tweeting one of the pair, 17-year-old TJ Khayatan, the museum joked: “Do we have a Marcel Duchamp in our midst?”
It linked out to a profile page for the French artist extolling how he “challenged traditional notions of making and exhibiting art”.
The similarity between his work and the stunt, which is arguably a piece of art itself, is clear from philosopher Stephen Hicks assessment of Duchamp’s infamous ‘Fountain’, which consisted simply of a urinal turned on its side:
|
“The Fountain” by Marcel Duchamp (1917) |
'The artist is a not great creator—Duchamp went shopping at a plumbing store. The artwork is not a special object—it was mass-produced in a factory. The experience of art is not exciting and ennobling—at best it is puzzling and mostly leaves one with a sense of distaste. But over and above that, Duchamp did not select just any ready-made object to display. In selecting the urinal, his message was clear: Art is something you piss on.' |
In spite of the mocking tone of the prank, Khayatan isn’t completely dismissive of modern art however, telling BuzzFeed: “I can agree that modern art can be a joke sometimes, but art is a way to express our own creativity.
“Some may interpret it as a joke, some might find great spiritual meaning in it. At the end of the day, I see it as a pleasure for open-minded people and imaginative minds.”
OPTION 2B: Prompt: Read the following article and write an argumentative essay establishing your response to the question: “ Is your generation more self-centered than earlier generations?” Be sure to address the article’s argument and evidence. Underline your thesis. Include one direct quote.
“A Generation’s Vanity, Heard Through Lyrics”By JOHN TIERNEY APRIL 25, 2011
A couple of years ago, as his fellow psychologists debated whether narcissism was increasing, Nathan DeWall heard Rivers Cuomo singing to a familiar 19th-century melody. Mr. Cuomo, the lead singer and guitarist for the rock band Weezer, billed the song as “Variations on a Shaker Hymn.”
Where 19th-century Shakers had sung “Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free,” Mr. Cuomo offered his own lyrics: “I’m the meanest in the place, step up, I’ll mess with your face.” Instead of the Shaker message of love and humility, Mr. Cuomo sang over and over, “I’m the greatest man that ever lived.”
The refrain got Dr. DeWall wondering: “Who would actually sing that aloud?” Mr. Cuomo may have been parodying the grandiosity of other singers — but then, why was there so much grandiosity to parody? Did the change from “Simple Gifts” to “Greatest Man That Ever Lived” exemplify a broader trend?
Now, after a computer analysis of three decades of hit songs, Dr. DeWall and other psychologists report finding what they were looking for: a statistically significant trend toward narcissism and hostility in popular music. As they hypothesized, the words “I” and “me” appear more frequently along with anger-related words, while there’s been a corresponding decline in “we” and “us” and the expression of positive emotions.
“Late adolescents and college students love themselves more today than ever before,” Dr. DeWall, a psychologist at the University of Kentucky, says. His study covered song lyrics from 1980 to 2007 and controlled for genre to prevent results from being skewed by the growing popularity of, say, rap and hip-hop.
Defining the personality of a generation with song lyrics may seem a bit of a reach, but Dr. DeWall points to research done by his co-authors that showed people of the same age scoring higher in measures of narcissism on some personality tests. The extent and meaning of this trend have been hotly debated by psychologists, some of whom question the tests’ usefulness and say that young people today aren’t any more self-centered than those of earlier generations. The new study of song lyrics certainly won’t end the debate, but it does offer another way to gauge self-absorption: the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The researchers find that hit songs in the 1980s were more likely to emphasize togetherness, like the racial harmony sought by Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder in “Ebony and Ivory” and the group exuberance promoted by Kool & the Gang: “Let’s all celebrate and have a good time.”
Today’s songs, according to the researchers’ linguistic analysis, are more likely be about one very special person: the singer. “I’m bringing sexy back,” Justin Timberlake proclaimed in 2006. The year before, Beyoncé exulted in how hot she looked while dancing — “It’s blazin’, you watch me in amazement.” And Fergie, who boasted about her “humps” while singing with the Black Eyed Peas, subsequently released a solo album in which she told her lover that she needed quality time alone: “It’s personal, myself and I.”
Two of DeWall’s co-authors, W. Keith Campbell and Jean M. Twenge, published a book in 2009 titled “The Narcissism Epidemic," which argued that narcissism is increasingly prevalent among young people — and possibly middle-aged people, too, although it’s hard to know because most data comes from college students.
For several decades, students have filled out a questionnaire called the Narcissism Personality Inventory, in which they’ve had to choose between two statements like “I try not to be a show-off” and “I will usually show off if I get the chance.” The level of narcissism measured by these questionnaires has been rising since the early 1980s, according to an analysis of campus data by Dr. Twenge and Dr. Campbell.
That trend has been questioned by other researchers who published fresh data from additional students. But in the latest round of the debate, the critics’ data has been reanalyzed by Dr. Twenge, who says that it actually supports her argument. In a meta-analysis published last year in Social Psychological and Personality Science, Dr. Twenge and Joshua D. Foster looked at data from nearly 50,000 students — including the new data from critics — and concluded that narcissism has increased significantly in the past three decades.
During this period, there have also been reports of higher levels of loneliness and depression — which may be no coincidence, according to the authors of the song-lyrics study. These researchers, who include Richard S. Pond of the University of Kentucky, note that narcissism has been linked to heightened anger and problems maintaining relationships. Their song-lyrics analysis shows a decline in words related to social connections and positive emotions (like “love” or “sweet”) and an increase in words related to anger and antisocial behavior (like “hate” or “kill”).
“In the early ’80s lyrics, love was easy and positive, and about two people,” says Dr. Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University. “The recent songs are about what the individual wants, and how she or he has been disappointed or wronged.”
Of course, in an amateur nonscientific way, you can find anything you want in song lyrics from any era. Never let it be said that the Rolling Stones were soft and cuddly. In “Sympathy for the Devil” the devil gets his due, and he gets to sing in the first person. In 1989, Bobby Brown bragged that “no one can tell me what to do” in his hit song about his awesomeness, “My Prerogative.”
Country singers have always had their moments of self-absorption and self-pity. But the classic somebody-done-somebody-wrong songs aren’t necessarily angry. When Hank Williams sang “Your Cheatin’ Heart” he didn’t mention trashing his sweetheart’s car, as in “Before He Cheats” by Carrie Underwood: “I took a Louisville slugger to both headlights.”
Some psychologists are skeptical that basic personality traits can change much from one generation to the next (or from one culture to another). Even if students are scoring higher on the narcissism questionnaire, these skeptics say, it may just be because today’s students are more willing to admit to feelings always there.
Dr. Twenge acknowledges that students today may feel more free to admit that they agree with statements on the questionnaire like “I am going to be a great person” and “I like to look at myself in the mirror.” But self-report bias probably isn’t the only reason for the changing answers, she says, and in any case this new willingness to brag is in itself an important cultural change.
The song-lyrics analysis, published in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts, goes up to 2007, which makes it fairly up-to-date by scientific standards. But by popular music standards, 2007 is an eon ago. Could narcissism have declined since then?
It would take a computerized linguistic analysis to be sure, but there are reasons to doubt it. In 2008, the same year as Weezer’s “Greatest Man That Ever Lived,” Little Jackie had a popular song titled “The World Should Revolve Around Me.”
The current Billboard chart includes the Cee-Lo Green comic ode to hostility with its unprintable refrain (for the Grammy television audience, he changed it to “Forget you”)…” Regardless of whether the singers really mean it, there’s obviously a market for these sentiments.
“The culture isn’t going to change wholesale overnight, and neither are song lyrics,” Dr. Twenge says. But she has some common-sense advice for those wanting to change themselves and their relationships.
“As much as possible, take your ego out of the situation,” Dr. Twenge says. “This is very difficult to do, but the perspective you gain is amazing. Ask yourself, ‘How would I look at this situation if it wasn’t about me?’ Stop thinking about winning all the time. A sure sign something might not be the best value: Charlie Sheen talks about it a lot.”
TEMPLATE for FINAL EXAM
Your Name
Professor Pridemore
ENC1101 Artist Name or CRN#
## December 2022
Final Exam Essay
PROMPT Chosen: LIST PROMPT HERE, I.E. Option 1A, Option 2B, etcetera…
Start writing your essay here. Have multiple paragraphs. Do not include extra space between paragraphs. Make sure you have at least one quote if you write on Option 2A or Option 2B.
Do not write on more than one prompt. So don’t try to answer prompts Option 1A through Option 1D. Choose ONLY one prompt. Use what you’ve learned! You do not need to include a works cited page.
Ask me if you have questions or run into issues. The minimum word requirement is 500 words. More words are ok. If you surpass 1,500 words, stop and consider how to wrap it up.
