Study Aid for Final

Places to begin:

• The study aid for the mid-term contains lots of useful information for the final as well. Review it.
• I have prepared some advice on taking essay exams that can also be accessed from the web site.
• You may also find some information that helps in How I grade.

Analyze your weaknesses from the midterm:

The parts of the exam are the same as on the mid-term. Think back over what parts of the exam you had trouble with on the mid-term. Then you can use the following to guide you on preparation the final:

• If you had trouble with matching: There are lots of cues you can use to identify speeches. Review the subject matter that particular speakers were interested in. Study their positions on those issues. Look for particular stylistic features of the speakers, and of the discourse that they contributed to.
• If you had trouble with multiple choice: Concentrate on introductions to the various units and to the speeches (in your textbooks). Review your introductory notes from each unit. Also review the introductory material from the course.
• If you had trouble with the essay questions: Study using comparison and contrast among the people and units of the course. What changed over the century? Over the different demands on leadership? What was alike? What similarities tie the century's discourse together? Ultimately, simply going over material -- just knowing "stuff" -- won't help with essay questions. You need to assemble things you have learned. To master that skill, you need to practice such assembly. Our discussions are the model for what you do on an essay question.

What the exam will be like:

• The exam will be slightly longer than the mid-term. It will be comprehensive (cover the entire course) but with more emphasis on the material since the mid-term than before. Half the grade will be matching, multiple choice, short answer, half essay.
• The extra credit will again be available. It will be a oft-quoted passage from an oft-quoted speech.
• Remember that although the exam will have essay questions like on the mid-term, the questions may not be exactly the same sort of questions. Essay questions may ask you to explain why you believe a particular leader succeeded or failed as a rhetor, to relate general lessons you have learned about leaders and their discourse, to describe some common characteristics of leadership in the century, to characterize particular arenas of leadership such as political or moral, or to compare and contrast various leaders' use of particular rhetorical themes or strategies. I assume that you will know the speeches that we have talked about in class well enough to use them in answering essay questions.

Some advice on preparation:

• In preparing the exam, I work hard to make certain that the most important things from the semester are tested. As you study each unit, ask yourself what is most important to know about that unit. Knowing what is more important is a testable quality of your knowledge and it helps you prepare efficiently for the test. What is most important will emerge from the lectures and from the discussions.
• The course is divided into units. Learning about each of those units will be natural as you study. In addition, however, I want you to know similarities in American discourse over those units (and subunits) and how American discourse has and has not changed over the century. So compare the units to each other frequently as you study.
• Remember that there are three kinds of skills you will need to demonstrate on the exam:
• Mastery of information. For this you have some "review sheets": lecture outlines on the web, your readings, and your notes from class. This type of question requires that you recall information that you have learned. The normal methods of memorization have proved useful to students in the past: flash cards, challenges to members of a study group, good old fashioned cramming.
• Interpretation of discourse. Other questions will require that you evaluate and interpret the ways in which leaders have used discourse to respond to moments of public exigency. Your notes and review sheets will help you access information to help you perform these analyses, but you must go beyond the information to interpret. For this, your participation in class is the only preparation. You can review the questions we have been using all semester, and apply them to the moments of leadership that we have studied. If you are studying in groups, challenge each other to evaluate the speeches that leaders gave in key moments and then critique each other's answers.
• Learning about leadership. Finally, essay questions will ask you to demonstrate what you have learned about rhetoric and leadership during the twentieth century. These questions will ask you to draw from the other two kinds of knowledge: to produce information on particular or general principles of leadership and to demonstrate or critique those principles in speeches you have studied. Formulate a list of questions of this sort that could be asked. Go over possible answers. Again group study with questions posed to each other and lively critique of answers are an assist in mastering this knowledge.

Good Luck

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