Dr. Koster's WRIT 102 Final Exam Preparation Handout
Final Exam is Monday, May 3, at 3 p.m. Be on time!
Instructions
Come to the exam promptly and prepared. If you are more than ten minutes tardy for whatever reason, you will not be permitted to take the exam. This is in fairness to your fellow students; a late arrival distracts their thinking and penalizes them unfairly.
Bring at least one blue book--more if your writing tends to be big. If you have to run and fetch a blue book and you are more than 10 minutes late in getting back, you will not be permitted to take the exam.
Bring more than one reliable writing instrument.
You may bring a dictionary if you wish; otherwise, the exam is closed-book, closed-notes.
You may bring this handout; be sure to read the case on the back before the exam.
The exam will ask you to answer some factual questions about arguments based on the situation. For instance, if you were a member of the American Civil Liberties Union and wanted to persuade Mrs. Bagby to withdraw her protest, which of the three kinds of argument strategies would you use, and why? Any of the argumentative strategies, logic materials, etc., we have discussed over the semester may show up in these questions.
You will then be asked to choose two of four questions and write two short argumentative essays based on this case. You will not need any further information than what the case presents.
You have 2.5 hours to complete the exam, but it should not take you that long to do so.
As stated on the syllabus, the final exam comprises 10% of your final grade.
You may look at your graded portfolio after you have turned in your exam.
Plainfield, SC, is a small central Piedmont town. It used to be a big fabric-producing town, but now that many of the mills have closed down, it is mostly a goods-and-services place. People in the town are very proud of their children and of raising them right.
Nancy Lynne Bagby is a 15-year old 10th grader at Plainfield High School. Her parents are divorced; she lives in Plainfield with her mom during the school year and with her Dad and his girlfriend in Ohio during vacations under a joint custody ruling. By all accounts she is a decent if not great student; she is not widely popular but has loyal friends. She and her family are not from around Plainfield originally, though they are native South Carolinians.
One day in late November Nancy Lynne checks out a book from the high school library—a teenage romance, a genre she really enjoys. It’s called All in Innocence and it deals with a young woman torn between the young man she has a crush on—a ‘fast’ good-looking boy from a bad crowd—and a rather plain-looking boy who likes her from afar. The book is by a reputable young-adult writer with many books to his credit, and is 178 pages long—what Nancy Lynne thinks of as "a nice long book". One scene, about 3 pages long, finds the heroine alone in the bad boy’s bedroom, where he removes her blouse and fondles and kisses her breasts. The language and description of both the acts and the heroine’s emotional response are pretty graphic for a teen novel, but actually fairly standard for a romance novel. (In terms of the plot, the couple is interrupted before the scene goes any further.)
Nancy Lynne enjoys the book, and mentions the scene in casual conversation with her mother, Sonja. Sonja, who takes her responsibilities as a single parent seriously, is outraged that such "perversity and pornography" are available in the high school library. She gathers 800 signatures outside the Piggly Wiggly on Saturday on a petition demanding that pornographic books be removed from the high school library. Armed with it, and backed by several dozen angry parents, she attends the Plainfield School Board meeting on Monday night and demands that this book be removed from the high school library immediately. She is accompanied by her lawyer. Both the Plainfield Courier and Channel 8 news, alerted that something may be up, cover the meeting. The result is a front-page story in the next day’s paper and lots of TV coverage.
By the end of the week, Nancy Lynne is refusing to go to school because of all the teasing she is getting; the School Board still hasn’t made a decision because all nine members haven’t read the book yet; and a real brouhaha is brewing. Sonja decides to send Nancy Lynne to her father’s house early to get her out of town.