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This English Composition course meets the requirements for both the
The
- To organize knowledge, ideas, and information
- To adopt rhetorical strategies (such as narration, illustration, explanation, description, comparing and contrasting, division, classification, and cause and effect) in appropriate ways
- To adopt and maintain a tone and point of view appropriate for a specified audience and rhetorical situation
- To develop and maintain a controlling idea and coherent organization
- To write within the rhetorical, syntactic, and mechanical conventions of Standard Written American English
The
The CLEP English Composition exam assesses writing skills taught in most first-year college composition courses. Two versions of the test are offered. (Taken from "English Composition," CLEP: English Composition, ©2009, [March 4, 2009].) One exam is all multiple-choice, and the other is multiple-choice with an essay. The multiple-choice version contains approximately 90 questions to be answered in 90 minutes. The version with the essay has two separately timed sections. Section I contains approximately 50 questions to be answered in 45 minutes, and Section II is comprised on one essay question to be answered in 45 minutes.
The CLEP multiple-choice questions measure students’ writing skills both at the sentence level and within the context of passages.
In skills at the sentence level, the exam measures your knowledge of a variety of logical, structural, and grammatical relationships within a sentence relating to
- Sentence boundaries
- Clarity of expression
- Agreement of subject and verb, verb tense, as well as pronoun reference, shift and number
- Active/passive voice
- Diction and idiom
- Syntax; namely, parallelism, coordination, subordination, dangling modifiers, etc.
- Sentence variety
The following kinds of question format assess sentence-level skills:
- Identifying sentence errors: The type of question requires you to identify working that violates the standard conventions of written discourse.
- Improving sentences: This type of question requires you to choose the phrase, clause, or sentence that best conveys the intended meaning of the sentence.
- Restructuring sentences: In this type of question, you are given a sentence to reword in order to change emphasis or improve clarity. You then must choose, from five option, the phrase that would most likely appear in the new sentence.
The skills in context measure recognition of the following in the context of works in progress or of published prose:
- Main idea/thesis
- Organization of ideas in the paragraph or essay
- Relevance of evidence, sufficiency of detail, levels of specificity
- Audience and purpose (effect on style, tone, language, or argument)
- Logic of argument (inductive, deductive reasoning)
- Coherence within and between paragraphs
- Rhetorical emphasis, effect
- Sustaining tense or point of view
- Sentence combining, sentence variety
The following kinds of questions measure writing skills in context:
- Revising work in progress: You identify ways to improve an early draft of an essay.
- Analyzing writing: You answer questions about each passage and about the strategies used by the author of each passage.
In the CLEP essay, you will be expected to present a point of view in response to a topic and to support it with a logical argument and appropriate evidence. You will have to type the essay on a computer.
The material contained in this course is directly related to one or both of the following textbooks:
- College Writing Skills, seventh edition, by John Langan (The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., 2008)—required for both the Excelsior and CLEP exams
- Literature for Composition: Essays, Fiction, Poetry, and Drama, eighth edition, edited by Sylvan Barnet, William Burto, and William E. Cain (Pearson/Longman, 2007)—required for the Excelsior exam only