Example Exam

This is the exam I gave for English 1110 last winter. Our exam on the 6th will have the same format and directions. In fact, the directions are identical. But there will be a different essay by a different author in SECTION A (obviously), and there will be three different quotations to choose from in SECTION B (obviously). Good luck.

MEMORIAL UNIVERSITY OF NEWFOUNDLAND

(St. John’s, Newfoundland)

ENGLISH 1110 – Sections 09 and 10

Final Examination                                                                               Time: 2 ½ Hours

Winter 2012                                                                                        Instructor: James Langer

DIRECTIONS: Students are required to answer TWO questions, ONE from Section A and ONE from Section B. Responses must be in essay form. Each essay is valued at 10% of the total mark and will be graded on content, organization, style, and mechanics.

Section A

Read the following essay carefully, and write a critical analysis by identifying the author’s argument and strategies.

Co-opting Dissent

Naomi Klein

When I was seventeen, I worked after school at an Esprit clothing store in Montreal. It was a pleasant job, mostly folding cotton garments into little squares so sharp that their corners could take your eye out. But for some reason, corporate headquarters didn’t consider our T-shirt origami to be sufficiently profitable. One day, our calmworld was turned upside down by a regional supervisor who swooped in to indoctrinate us in the culture of the Esprit brand – and increase our productivity in the process. “Esprit,” she told us, “is like a good friend.”

I was sceptical, and let it be known. Scepticism, I quickly learned, is not considered an asset in the low-wage service sector. Two weeks later, the supervisor fired me for being in possession of that most loathed workplace character trait: “bad attitude.” I guess that was one of my first lessons in why multinational corporations are not “like a good friend,” since good friends, while they may sometimes do horrible and hurtful things, rarely fire you.

            So I was interested when, earlier this month, the TBWA/Chiat/Day advertising agency rolled out the new “brand identity” for Shoppers Drug Mart. (Rebranding launches are, in corporate terms, like being born again.) It turns out that the chain is no longer Everything You Want in a Drugstore – i.e., a place where you can buy things you need; it too is now a “caring friend,” one that takes form as a chain of eight hundred drugstores with a $22 million ad budget burning a hole in its pocket.

Shoppers’ new slogan is Take Care of Yourself, selected, according to campaign creator Pat Pirisi, because it echoes “what a caring friend would say.” Get ready for it to be said thousands of times a day by young cashiers as they hand you plastic bags filled with razors, dental floss, and diet pills. “We believe this is a position Shoppers can own,” Pirisi says.

Asking clerks to adopt this particular phrase as their mantra seems a bit heartless in this age of casual, insecure, underpaid McLabour. Service-sector workers are so often told to take care of themselves – since no one, least of all their mega-employers, is going to take care of them.

Yet it’s one of the ironies of our branded age that as corporations become more remote by cutting lasting ties with us as their employees, they are increasingly sidling up to us as consumers, whispering sweet nothings in our ear about friendship and community. It’s not just Shoppers: Wal-Mart ads tell stories about clerks who, in a pinch, lend customers their own wedding gowns, and Saturn ads are populated by car dealers who offer counselling when customers lose their jobs. You see, according to a new marketing book, Values Added, modern marketers have to “make your brand a cause and your cause a brand.”

Maybe I still have a bad attitude, but this collective corporate hug feels about as empty today as it did when I was an about-to-be-unemployed sweater folder. Particularly when you stop to consider the cause of all this mass-produced warmth.

Explaining Shoppers’ new brand identity to The Financial Times, Pirisi said, “In an age when people are becoming more distrustful of corporations – the World Trade Organization protests will attest to that – and at a time when the health care system isn’t what it used to be, we realized we had to send consumers a message about partnership.”

Ever since large corporations such as Nike, Shell and Monsanto began facing increased scrutiny from civil society – mostly for putting short-term profits far ahead of environmental responsibility and job security – an industry has ballooned to help these companies respond. It seems clear, however, that many in the corporate world remain utterly convinced that all they have is a “messaging problem,” one that can be neatly solved by settling on the right, socially minded brand identity.

It turns out that’s the last thing they need. British Petroleum found this out the hard way when it was forced to distance itself from its own outrageous rebranding campaign, Beyond Petroleum. Understandably, many consumers interpreted the slogan to mean the company was moving away from fossil fuels in response to climate change. Human rights and environmental activists, after seeing no evidence that BP was actually changing its policies, brought up embarrassing details at the company’s annual meeting about BP’s participation in a controversial new pipeline through sensitive areas of Tibet, as well as its decision to drill in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. With the new slogan being parodied on the Net as Beyond Preposterous, BP officials moved to abandon the Beyond Petroleum brand, though they so far have stuck with the new green flower logo.

As evidence of the state of corporate confusion, I frequently find myself asked to give presentations to individual corporations. Fearing that my words will end up in some gooey ad campaign, I always refuse. But I can offer this advice without much reservation: nothing will change until corporations realize that they don’t have a communications problem. They have a reality problem.

Klein, Naomi. “Co-Opting Dissent.”Reader’s Choice: Essays for Thinking, Reading, and Writing. 7th Edition. Eds. Kim Flachmann,

Michael Flachmann, Alexandra MacLennan, Jamie Zeppa. Toronto: Pearson, 2011. Print.

SECTION B

Write an essay in response to ONE of the following quotations. Feel free to agree or disagree, but aim to focus your topic, express your perspective clearly, and construct a well reasoned argument with supporting details.

1.      “Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we do not experience it.”

– Max Frisch

2.      “A cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience.”

– Naomi Wolf

3.      “It isn't the mountains ahead to climb that wear you out; it's the pebble in your shoe.”

– Muhammad Ali