So today Britney and I took the upper division writing exam. You see, the CSU system has decided that they need to make sure that their graduates can write in complete sentences and stuff (go figure). But seriously, it's pretty dumb. This says it all.
Anyway, so we took this test today, and we weren't nervous about it or anything; it's just a nuisance. But it's been a while since I've actually had to do the whole formal five-paragraph essay thing, and I was reminded of how much I hate it. I don't hate writing, I just hate exam-style writing.
In my opinion, the worst thing about essay exams are the prompts themselves. They're always about boring topics that nobody wants to write about, like violence in the media. You sit there formulating your three main points and coming up with supporting arguments for each point, and you're just thinking "Man, I'm bored with this, and I'm the one writing it. I feel sorry for the graders." I mean seriously, who comes up with these prompts? Why can't we ever get a cool topic, like "What would you do if you saw an elephant flying overhead?" Now that's something that I would like to write about, and I'm sure the graders would have a bit more fun, too.
Our prompts today were particularly retarded. The first one was a rhetorical analysis, but there were like five separate questions within the prompt itself. So I just wrote a well-formulated analysis of the author's arguments and didn't address the rest of the prompt--maybe a bad decision, but oh well. The next prompt was even worse. There were about six or seven different questions that they asked, and all I could think was "Do you want us to write a good essay or do you want us to address all of the questions in the prompt? 'Cause if I do both, it's gonna take about ten pages, man, and you've only given us an hour." So on the second one I just kinda answered the questions in the prompt without giving much thought to composition. But seriously, one question will do. No need for a half page prompt.
Again, I'm not nervous about passing. It was just an unpleasant experience. Thank you for listening.
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Sorry you had to take a dumb test. Good news is, the GRE is much harder from what I hear. :)
ReplyDeleteMan, I thought that media violence was an exhausted subject as well, but after studying it in my mass comm theory class, I could easily write an essay on it. That being said, I would have a lot more fun writing about flying elephants.
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