Test Revision Extra Credit

The Assignment and Grading
The ability to write in a concise, coherent, complete, and original manner benefits students in all their classes and throughout their lives.  Skillful writing facilitates communication--not just your academic communications.  Good writers tend to be good speakers as well.  Fluency in language translates to improved communications in both professional and private life.  Writing likewise allows one to externalize, evaluate, and refine one's thinking and decision-making to oneself and to others. The process of writing also helps one to uncover strengths and weakness in one's understanding, to identify connections between ideas, and to organize one's thought.

Becoming a good writer isn't a one-shot self-improvement project.  One must actively develop one's writing skills throughout life.  Writing with feedback helps to develop one's writing ability, but reading widely helps as well.  Even proofreading other people's work helps you develop your writing.

This assignment encourages students to revise their test and to practice some techniques for systematically approaching their tests--both during and before the test.  The assignment also encourages students to work on their proofreading and punctuation skills.  As with any class and any assignment, the more effort one puts into this exercise, the greater the benefit.  

What To Do
To start, if your test has several comments about style or grammar, go to the linked pages and do some practice exercises as well.  At the beginning of your revised answer, note which, if any, exercises you completed.

Detailed Instructions
Once you have completed any grammar and style exercises you must complete the following:  Wallis gave a short lecture on systematically answering test questions and studying.  For each question you wish to submit as part of this exercise you'll need two printed copies of the following;  (1) A copy of the lecture outlines (Just the first few slides of a lecture) for the relevant lectures,  (2) A copy of the test question.  For each question you revise: (1) Go through the printed lecture outlines and try to do the things described in (B) and (C) in the study section of Wallis' Lecture on test taking (slides one and two).  (2) Use your printed copy of each question and write your answer (and mark-up the question) as outlined in the reading test questions section of Wallis' lecture on test taking (slides three and four).   (3) Rewrite your answer using your road map.  Print your revision.  (4) Turn in all your work to Wallis in class by the due date.

You can receive 50% of the missed points on any question that you revise for this exercise.  However, what you have to complete and turn in to receive the 50% of missed points is determined by the following scheme:   

What I'm looking For In Revisions
You should read my comments on your answer and make sure you understand exactly what problems I have indicated in your answer.  Some comments concern missing elements of the answer.  Some suggest errors in understanding or exposition of the issue addressed in the question, and some indicate stylistic suggestions.  I would encourage you to clearly identify the exact nature of each comment prior to revision and indicate it on your test.  If a comment indicates a content issue, you should go back and look at the article and lecture slides before trying to revise.  If there is a stylistic issue, you might want to look up the issue to better understand what people consider to be appropriate conventions or a more effective style.  Once you finish with revisions for each comment, you should go through the entire revised answer and double check that you've addressed every comment.  Once you have revised your answer, I would suggest your read it aloud and listen to the flow of the writing.  You can often catch grammatical and stylistic problems when you are reading the text aloud that you don't notice in reading it silently.   It is also important to devote separate readings to content and to grammar.  Don't try to do too much at the same time.  Finally, cut and paste your revised answer and the graded original answer into the same document. 

Additional Exercises
Once you have completed any grammar and style exercises everyone must complete and submit revision of your answer using your road map.  In accordance with the above chart, you may also need to complete the following:  Wallis gave a short lecture on systematically answering test questions and studying.

Exercise (1) for each question you revise: Use your printed copy of each question and write your answer (and mark-up the question) as outlined in the reading test questions section of Wallis' lecture on test taking (slides three and four).  

Exercise (2) for each question you revise: Print out a cop of the following: A copy of the lecture outlines (Just the first few slides of a lecture) for the relevant lectures.  Go through the printed lecture outlines and try to do the things described in (B) and (C) in the study section of Wallis' Lecture on test taking (slides one and two). 

Some General Expository Suggestions:

Address All Aspects of the Question
Students often loose points for failing to answer all aspects of a question.  If a question asks you to outline and evaluate an argument and you only discuss the argument's weaknesses, you will lose points.  I often encourage people to go through the question and explicitly outline the aspects they need to address or to make a list of all the elements that their answer must posses.  See the little lecture on test writing at this link.

Don't Write For The Professor on a Test
In general people should write to their audience making only the assumptions, relying only on the knowledge, using only the vocabulary, etc. that one might expect their readers to share.  However, in writing a test you should not write an answer with the instructor in mind as the audience.  Sure the instructor can fill in pieces that are implicit, he or she has knowledge of the appropriate vocabulary, and so on.  However, you are trying to convey your understanding of the material in a test answer.  The relevant facts are not what the professor knows, but what you know.  You are thus better off writing your answer with a novice as your intended audience.  Ask yourself, "what would I say if I had to explain this to someone who has never taken this class?"

Define All Technical Words
If you are using vocabulary that us is unique to philosophy or to the specific course, you ought to indicate its meaning.  So, you ought to note that "Doxastic" relates to belief.

Your Answer Should Be an Interconnected Story Rather Than A List
I try to ask questions that encourage students to draw ideas together into a coherent account that links ideas of arguments together.  In general, you ought always to try to understand how the elements of a philosophical position or argument fit together.  You should always ask yourself questions like: What problems does the philosopher seek to solve?  What assumptions frame the philosophers' thought, or the philosophic topic generally?  What is a paper's thesis or theses?  How does each element or section of a paper relate to the other elements in supporting the thesis?  The story you must tell your reader delimits the ideological or argumentative connections of a work.  Merely recounting when ideas or arguments occur in the text confuses the superficial topography of the text with its underlying ideological and argumentative connections.  In other words, telling your reader when Descartes opines, "Cogito ergo sum" does not help your reader to understand the significance of that judgment in the context of Descartes' epistemic project.

Some General Stylistic Suggestions:
Passive vs Active Voice:
Try to use active as opposed to passive verb constructions as your primary verb constructions.  Active verb constructions are verb constructions in which the sentence's subject does the action.  Passive verb constructions create sentences where the subject receives the action of the verb the agent for which is often not even given the sentence.  Put another way, passive constructions make the object of a sentence into the subject of a sentence.  Specifically, passive verb constructions utilize both a being verb (are, is, etc.) and another verb (in past participle form) to describe the actions of a subject.  Thus, one can identify passive verb constructions by looking for multiple verbs with this specific structure.

Passive:  I am bored by Wallis' lectures.

Active: Wallis' lectures bore me. 

Passive: Socrates was said to be pug-nosed.

Active: People describe Socrates as pug-nosed. 

Passive verb constructions are no less grammatical or useful in writing.  However, passive verb constructions often create unnecessarily awkward or complicated sentences.  Writers often suggest that excessive passive verb constructions make one's prose unclear, flat, and uninteresting.

Subject-Verb Agreement:
All of the parts of your sentence should agree with one another.  Most native speakers recognize instinctively whether a verb goes with a subject or object.  However, there are two exceptions to native speaker recognition.  First, native speakers often use singular verbs with plural nouns and vice versa.  Second, native speakers often use colloquial expressions that differ from accepted formal rules of subject-verb agreement.  Trouble can also emerge when one has a preposition or a verb governing two or more pronouns.  

Singular vs Plural: Any one of these mistakes are possible.  Disagreement  Any one of these mistakes is possible.  Agreement  The verb must always agree with the subject.  In this case, the subject is "any one" NOT "mistakes."

Colloquialisms:  I has to rewrite my paper.  Disagreement  I have to rewrite my paper.  Agreement

Prepositions and Pronouns:  Wallis' class was helpful for you and I.  Disagreement   Wallis' class was helpful for you and me.  Agreement  Such cases are often unintuitive for people until you notice the the first sentence can be expressed using two sentences:  "Wallis' class was helpful for you."  and  "Wallis' class was helpful for I."  Similar problems exist for "You and me had better get moving."

Verb Tense:
In general one need not maintain a single verb tense throughout a piece of writing.  In fact, the whole purpose of verb tense is to allow expression of relative temporal position.  However, writers should adhere to two rules of thumb.  First, unnecessary or inconsistent changes in verb tense confuse readers.  Second, in talking about ideas and doctrines scholars adhere to the convention of using the present tense.  The idea here is that ideas are current no matter when they were originally conceived.   So, one shouldn't really say, "Dualism was an untenable doctrine."  One ought to say, "Dualism is an untenable doctrine."

Overuse or Misuse of Pronouns:
Pronouns are indexicals.  That is, the context of a sentence determines the reference of a pronoun.  For example, "I" always refers to the speaker/writer.  So, "I hate Wallis," expresses either loathing or self-loathing depending upon whether you or I write it.  Pronouns allow writers to reduce redundancy (i.e., repetitive use of names) and draw connections between sentences.  However, students often misuse or over use pronouns.  For example, using "he" 50 times is as redundant as using "BonJour" 50 times.  More importantly, if one uses pronouns preceded by multiple individuals, those pronouns introduce ambiguity and undermine clarity.  Finding the reference for ambiguous pronouns makes one's writing more difficult to comprehend--even when the ambiguity goes unnoticed. 

Ambiguous: The emancipation proclamation draws authority from article II, section 2 of the United States Constitution.  It is part of the fundamental legal structure of our country.  (Possible references for it: the emancipation proclamation, article II, section 2 of the United States Constitution, article II of the United States Constitution, the United States Constitution).

Unambiguous: The emancipation proclamation draws authority from article II, section 2 of the United States Constitution.  The constitution is part of the fundamental legal structure of our country.