Dear Students,

There are two things that I would like to do during our class session on Thursday:

1/ Have each of you present a three to four minute overview of your research project

2/ Begin drafting the research essay

The two activities are complementary.  However, I’m not certain that we will have time for both during one class session since our class is quite large.  There are 25 students in our course.  Assuming each student presents for three minutes, the presentations will take up the entire class session.  The question then is whether it might be possible to compress each presentation down to two minutes, which would then leave us (in theory if not in fact) with 25 minutes of class time for drafting.

My research is focused around an investigation of ______(name your topic or research question_______________________.

The draft title of my project is ____________(name title of your draft Overview of Sources essay)________________________.

The exam will be divided into two sections.  In the first part, you will write a three paragraph letter in which you first introduce and explain why you are writing the letter, second explain the key points you have to make related to the topic, and thirdly explain the relevance of the topic.  You will have 45 minutes to write this letter.  There will be two topics and you can choose from one:

1/ Read Neil Postman’s essay “Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change.”  After reading the essay, choose ONE of the five ideas that he presents and write to him explaining how it relates to the specific technologies that you have been doing research on.

2/ On the day of the exam, you will be given an advertisement that features the term and concept of technology prominently. Based on your analysis of this ad, you will write a letter to the organization using the advertisement in which you explain why there may be problems with how the term and conept of technology is used in the advertisement, the key issues that may arise in relation to this use, and the significance and implications of this use.  Please make sure to cite evidence in your letter from both the readings that we have done for this class and the readings you have done for your research essay.

The second part of the exam will consist of a short reading that you will be asked to answer some questions about.

To prepare for this exam, please review the following materials:

Your reading notes on the essays from _Technology: A Reader for Writers_

Your class notes

Your course assignments (completing GA8/GA9 will also help tremendously in preparing for the exam)

Writing About Texts

Introduction to Summary Writing

Understanding Sentences in SWE

Summarizing and Paraphrasing Sources