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Planning takes place on two different levels: structuring each essay around a thesis supported by an argument with a beginning, middle, and end; and managing the time to produce a good essay--from analyzing the question to proofreading the final product. Essay questions usually ask the student to demonstrate facts, compare theories, or extrapolate from facts or theories. The facts may be as simple as dates, or as complicated as the steps in a complex argument; comparisons may simply require familiarity with material, or may involve interpretation; extrapolation may involve applying a theory, or may challenge you to critique the assumptions and methods of the course. In each case, you can plan a framework and a procedure for making the most of what you know in the available time by taking a project view of the whole exam.
A Project View of the Whole Exam Exams generally are created as projects, either by an instructor or by a dedicated staff working under a professor. The unarticulated goal is to epitomize the course method (the instructor's approach to the material) and to reiterate the significance of typifying events, ideas, and shifts in thought. When you read through the whole exam as if it were a coherent work, you find out how the exam makers value the course material. You also discover what they anticipate from good essays: the level of generality, the intensity of focus, the breadth of references and examples. You will see, too, of course, where your preparation is weak or strong: the events or issues or theories about which you could write for hours, and those about which it will be difficult to write anything at all. To plan effectively, it is better to know this at once, so that your mind can begin retrieving as much information as possible. Everyone has had the experience of remembering a fact or an example after an exam is over. Acknowledging a difficult question at the start prompts recall. A good exam will inspire you to think hard about the material. It will cover a lot of ground, and ask you to draw on the books, articles, and cases you have studied. Each question requires a full answer; you cannot hope to make up for what you don't know on one question by doing a wonderful job on another. Essays on the two questions may be read by different readers, who may not have written those questions in the first place. Viewing the whole exam as a coherent piece of writing, however fragmented it may appear, allows you to use time and space efficiently, and to do a thorough job. Time and Space If the exam allots time or credit to each question ("fifty minutes, fortyfive points"), you take this into account as a signal of the importance of the material. But your personal timetable should be realistic and practical in harnessing your energies. For every exam, of whatever difficulty or importance, set aside time for planning at the beginning, and proofreading at the end. Most people do far too little of either, under the mistaken notion that the main goal is to pile up as many words as possible. There may be exams in which that is a temptation: you might have learned from experience in a course that your readers only skim your exam book, and give little or no comment except a letter grade. These signals of poor readings are clear enough, and you and your friends may decide that "they" are less interested in what you know than in how much you can get down on the page. But a writer's assumption that the reader is irresponsible is self-defeating, the counterpart to the illusion that a reader will supply the words and ideas the writer meant to say, the steps left out of an argument or remembered after an exam is over. Exams are a burden to most people, too serious as a symbolic ritual to be taken lightly, and not serious enough to be transformed into an opportunity for learning. The danger for the examwriter is that such illusions about audience undercut control over the writing process. Instead, imagine your audience as a willing but pressured reader fully capable of understanding what you have to say, as long as you say it with reasonable care. Focus briefly on what each question asks. It is not necessary to pin down everything at this point. You will return to each question once you've created a quick set of argument-outlines for the whole exam. But the overall perspective you build by working quickly through the whole exam enables you to rearrange or change the emphasis of material in each outline once you begin writing. Moreover, you will be able to integrate new material prompted by thinking through each question, instead of trying to squeeze it in later on or leaving it out entirely. Write out a provisional thesis, condensed because-clauses that represent evidence in support of it, and one or two good examples. If you start your provisional thesis with "Although . . ." you will be sure that you sketch out at least one opposing argument as well. Review these condensed because-clauses, number them in order of importance, and you will have a miniature argument-outline, an efficient design for a structured essay. If you do this for each question first, before you begin to write, you create a safety net for the whole exam. Concentrating briefly on all of the questions first gives you the confidence that you are going to make the most of what you know. Planning twenty minutes or so at the end to proofread what you've written ensures that you will get a decent reading. (A simple way to keep the writing process open for new ideas even as you actively proofread is to write your exam essays on the right-hand pages of the exam booklet, and use the left-hand facing pages for words, phrases, examples, or qualifications to be inserted into the text with arrows.) Your preparation, planning, and structuring enables the reader to follow your argument; the proofreading allows your reader to make out the words on the page. Papers can go through successive drafts; exams cannot. Your essay exam proofreading brings what is essentially a rough draft closer to the level of a finished product. At first, planning may seem to take more time than you can afford. But consider this typical case. A final exam lasts three hours. There are three thirty-five minute questions, each worth twenty points, and a seventy-five minute question worth forty points. With the QUICK WRITING PROCESS approach, you know at once that you need about twenty minutes at the end for proofreading, and a little more than that at the beginning to review the whole exam, planning each question to the point of a quick argument-outline. This will leave about two and a quarter hours for the actual writing. No matter how you do on the shorter questions, you will want to do a good job on the long one because it carries so much credit. If you plan twenty-five minutes for each of the shorter essays, you will have about an hour for the long one, a timetable corresponding roughly to the amount of credit allotted to each question. You may want to do the long question first, to give it your best energy; or you may want to save it for the second hour because you know from experience that as you write the shorter essays you will remember more facts, examples, and theories from the lectures, readings, and handouts. Whatever your decision, if you take control of the examwriting process consciously, you will ensure your best product, and learn the most about your own writing under pressure. Pace and Intensity One advantage of starting with an easy question is that the process of writing with confidence goes a long way toward diminishing the anxieties inherent in the examwriting situation. Once you have an idea of what you want to say, hesitation in committing words to the page only increases fear and panic, making clear thinking difficult. Writing what you know first gets you started. Invariably, writing what you do know helps you recall other things that can be applied to the questions about which you have less to say. But there is another benefit as well. As you select the most representative material for an easy question, you store up fresh energy and time for the more difficult ones. This is a simple matter of pacing. If you expend all your energy writing out everything you know about one question, you will feel drained, and find it all the more difficult to turn to the questions for which material is harder to recall. People don't often think of pace as a skill in writing. But consider the analogy with a runner in a mile race who goes out too fast in the first quarter, opens a lead, and then begins to fade as the other runners who have maintained a steady pace draw on their reserves of energy for the last turn. An examwriter's race against time requires pacing; each part, the difficult as well as the easy, must be done with appropriate energy to ensure a thorough job. Whether you've chosen the easiest, or the most important question, first, you will have taken into account pace, time, and structure in shaping your answer. When the time is up for one question, move on to amplify the outline for the next. Answering the Question Essay questions are not often clearly stated. Few are challenging. Translating each question into a working outline before you write gives you a perspective on the goals of the whole exam. Then, you will have a better sense of how to come to terms with what each question really asks, and what kind of answer it anticipates. This may be evident upon the first reading with some questions, such as those framed to elicit facts or steps in a sequence. But with others that are abstract, obliquely worded, or deliberately open, you can begin by clarifying, narrowing, or transforming the question in order to write what you know in the most effective way. This isn't as difficult or as risky as it sounds. Every question on an exam is the result of compromises in the exam creator's mind. There is too much material in a course to cover in a few questions or in a few hours. Conscientious teachers may try to cram too much into a question, or use the exam to make a point they feel was neglected during the term. They may work very hard on their exam questions and overdo it, as in this example from a core science course: "How does energy on the earth flow to and through living organisms?" This might make an interesting title for a lecture to a sophisticated audience, but it represents an inappropriate level of abstraction for freshmen in a survey course. In this particular case, the instructors were appalled by the lack of details in their students' answers. Even the most conscientious students were appalled by the lack of specificity in the question. Here is a more concrete example, a take-home essay in a graduate course: "Trace the history of American foreign policy from George Washington to Ronald Reagan. Limit your answer to one page." What can one say for a question that asks for so much in so little space? The exam maker could not reasonably anticipate a chronological recital of doctrines and manifestoes. The question calls for a conclusion only, perhaps a restatement of the underlying principle of the course. However puzzling (or absurd) this question seems, you can respond by translating what you know into the appropriate level of generality. Writing good exam questions is a skill few people possess. Questions that evoke learning or elicit knowledge are rarer still. The examwriter should take this into account in transforming poorly posed questions into issues worth writing about. The standard advice about exam essays is to begin by simply restating the question: "Energy on the earth flows to and through living organisms in many ways." Perhaps this may help you get started. But there is usually some latitude, and even an obligation to take a stand toward the question, to show not only that you have covered material, but thought about it, too, making comparisons, and drawing connections: "Both plant and animal cells . . ."; or, "Although American foreign policy has fluctuated between. Turning the question to your own interests is an essential first step in the writing process. If you diverge from the main thrust of a question, or redirect it, your explanation for doing so becomes your introduction. Keep in mind how dull it can be to read a set of bluebooks. A few essays approach an ideal in the reader's mind; most others fall far short in one way or another. Any reader welcomes a piece of writing that is fresh and full of energy. If your reasons are interesting in themselves, and if the turn you take allows you to demonstrate the kind of knowledge called for in the question, you will produce one of the few essays that can be read with pleasure. Focusing Meaning through the Lens of Time Moving from one question to the next, you abide by a timetable and quick argument-outlines. You've reserved time for proofreading at the end. Once you have shaped a question in a way that will bring the best out of you under pressure, you can write clearly and efficiently. Since examwriting is so concentrated, examples from the course material are especially important. The issue here is representation: choosing material that can reflect more than itself by crystallizing an explanation or standing for related material. This selection is a skill in itself. If you read an abstract essay, you feel relief at every concrete example, not only for the specificity but as a resting place to gather your thoughts. Concrete examples keep the reader involved in the work. To the reader of an exam, the examwriter's views are a set of abstractions which can only be made clear, in the limited time available, through good examples. If a philosopher develops a theory in one or several works, then an exam question about that theory will usually ask the student to apply it to a particular case. The examwriter's job is to make an example represent as much as possible about the whole theory: its origins, strengths, and weaknesses. Again, as was the case in transforming the question, the writer does best to choose examples that reflect his or her own interest in the material. Careful selection of examples that represent your own understanding of the material extends your essay beyond its severe space and time boundaries. Internal coherence and overall unity in writing ensure clarity. Since you won't have a second chance, your transitions must alert the reader to the connections among the specific points, and the relationship of each to your overall thesis. It is possible to find a striking, fresh example and neglect to show how it illustrates or explains an idea, yet such connections are rarely self-evident. If your example represents your point of view, anchor it in the context of your whole essay. Finally, you have to write out the conclusion of your essay for the reader, rather than hoping to save time by implying it, or depending on the reader to interpret it for you. A reader may or may not know what you are driving at; your job is to explain, to let the reader in on your thinking and then present your conclusions. A good conclusion returns the reader to the question, but seen now through the lens of the examwriter's thesis and examples. Proofreading Nothing is harder to read than a piece of writing chaotically produced under pressure. Most students and professionals at every level fail to realize this simple fact. Some students assume the professor in a large survey course (instead of the teaching assistant) will read their papers. In the same way, people who take exams imagine a meticulous reader capable of making sense out of what is usually little more than a rough draft, annotated between the lines, with crossings out and perhaps a note or two added ("misspelled?"; "sorry--no time to fill in here"). But professors and teaching assistants rarely have the time to decipher illegible writing, fill in gaps, forge missing connections, or rectify errors in spelling, grammar, punctuation, and diction. Instead, the reader's difficulty in understanding your words on the page will be reflected in his or her evaluation of your writing. QUICK WRITING PROCESS examwriting insists on a timetable, structured essays, a practical distribution of the writer's energy, and a sustained level of intensity. But this practical system for organizing your thinking efficiently is rendered useless if your essays are impossible to read. Students rarely understand why an active proofreading is so important. But if they are asked to read their own writing or that of a fellow student aloud, they discover words missing, ideas truncated by revision and not completed, repetitions, and unresolved paradoxes. A typewritten paper usually can be read; handwritten exams can be largely illegible. More often than a student imagines, at least part of what he or she wrote in a bluebook contributed nothing to the grade. As with all writ- ing, but particularly on an exam, the writer needs to take responsibility for every word to ensure a decent reading. An Examwriting Policy Exams almost always disappoint the exam makers: "We prepared them for a whole week. We gave them handouts. We even gave them the questions the night before, and still they did a lousy job!" Students usually don't realize that the way they take an exam is a message in itself. "What!" the insulted reader thinks, "Five pages without a single example. . . . How can I read this!" But carefully planned, comprehensive essays with appropriate examples show a familiarity with course material and an appreciation of method, integrating facts and ideas in clear, fresh ways. They allow writer and reader to transform the ritual of testing into a learning and teaching experience.I began this chapter on examwriting by describing the futility for both writer and reader of an "eighth bluebook" that is written frantically and read grudgingly. But an exam that is undertaken as a writing project, with an awareness of both the reader's need for clarity, examples, and comprehensiveness, and the writer's need to learn something useful and increase skill and confidence in writing, is bound to be satisfying. |
