27 September 2010

Essay test questions

If you are reading this lucky you! You will be one up on your classmates.

For the essay part of the test, you will have to answer 2 essay questions. I will have 5 questions for you to pick from. The questions are:

Explain how cities developed. Where did these cities develop? What happens when cities expand?

What does it mean to be civilized?

What does history mean to you?

How did we (humans) get to here? Discuss the points of evolution that we covered in class. Why did those changes take place?

What technology discovery was the most important? Why?

Here are some hints on responding to essay questions. The first thing you sould do is re write the question so you can see it in your own writing, now your answer sheet has some writing. Next do a quick brainstorm, write down all the things that you can recall from class regarding the question. You can do this in the margin or on a scratch sheet. After you have some ideas, circle the three that you know the most about. These should be the three things you write about in your essay.

Now that you know what you are going to write about you need a topic sentence to introduce what you are going to be writing about in your response. You can do this by writing out the topics and writing why they relate to the topic and why the are important. This paragraph should be brief, but full of information. You need to be sure you get to the point so you have time to fully answer the question.

The next paragraphs should be about the three things you circled in your brainstorm. Don't worry so much about format or making every thing flow or transition well, you should focus on writing as much as you know about the topic. Do make sure that all the sentences in your paragraph relate to the topic.

If you have time you should write a concluding paragraph. In this paragraph your goal should be to simply restate the main topic, the three topics you chose to write about and how they relate. The other thing you can do if you find yourself ahead of schedule is to re read your essay. Whild doing so keep these questions in mind: Does it make sense? Did I answer the question and support my response?

I hope that makes sense and good luck!! If you have any questions you know how to contact me (thewis@augsburg.edu)

Dan