Sample Essays of the
Writing Proficiency Exam

The essays and writing prompts below are samples of the typical WPE format. Students are asked to read and respond to a 350-500 word passage. Generally, you will be asked to summarize the passage, consider its argument and respond to it, taking into consideration opposing viewpoints. A WPE essay is satisfactory only if it answers directly the question that was asked, so it's important to pay careful attention to the directive words in the writing prompt. You are expected to write organized, well-developed paragraphs which support a clear thesis explaining your position. A successful WPE essay develops an argument beyond vague statements and generalizations and offers reliable proof to support a position.

The WPE will draw upon your background as an upper-division student, your life experience, and your knowledge, but you do not need to learn any new information to respond to the typical writing prompt.

Links to sample student essays follow the two sample passages and prompts below.

With few exceptions, the dreamy comfort of U.S. affluence and the absence of significant national challenges or threats in the last decade saw popular culture detail and magnify some banal, superficial, narrow and commercial aspects of American Life.

During these recent days of nonstop news, did anyone miss the aggressive advertising or obsession with fame, sex, celebrity and beauty? Does the buzz over cleavage at a televised, canned-awards show merit even a sign now? Or the celebrations of gossip and notoriety, misogyny and violence that pervaded our public chatter as recently as Sept. 10th? Having seen the obscenity of real violence, does anyone await more of the staged stuff?

Last year's earnest debate on the gravitas (seriousness) of presidential candidates might better be directed at the larger society. Now, while we're pained and uncomfortable, is the time to reconsider not just airport security but cultural priorities-what we as cultural consumers choose to consume. Pop culture's manufacturers claim they merely provide what we, America's consumers, want. OK, let's redefine what we want.

Even mired in the emotional muck of awful death and destruction, we half-expect a boastful 30-minute special explaining how filmmakers accomplished such realistic special effects for our entertainment. We have already seen heroes' images repackaged and fed back to us in quick cuts by advertisers offering a "salute." But those weren't stuntmen on fire falling to their death. And we won't see firefighters and office workers stride out of the smoke in slo-mo, soiled but safe, in time for the credits.

Should a pretend "Survivor" still sell once we've survived the real thing? And seen so many genuine innocents who did not?

In the long run, post-9/11 popular culture may rise to the creative challenge of describing and interpreting the realities of the less secure, more complex world we now realize we inhabit. This won't be easy. It requires real thought, less formulaic eye candy of the physical beauty and exploding gunpowder varieties. The visual shorthand and perhaps tastes have changed drastically. Will the new era produce a new "All Quiet on the Western Front*" or more Green Beret movies**?

The mental wounds remain raw, as they will for a while. Late-night hosts will control themselves, at least temporarily, while deciphering what we'll accept as humorous or tasteful. All this will be shaped by the anticipated new "war," whatever that drawn-out struggle will look and feel like.

Many urge a rapid return to normalcy. At least in terms of popular culture, individual Americans may ponder, in light of the pains we've shared, whether recent normalcy is what we really want to return to. Or has the real reality show and its agonizing images perhaps cured our recent infatuation with shallow fame and hollow shocks?

*1930 film thoughtfully exploring various impacts of WWI on the lives of individual soldiers. ** 1968 film glorifying wholeheartedly the American cause in the Vietnam War.

Topic: Read the recent editorial carefully and briefly summarize the argument. Give your definition of "popular culture," and explain the benefits of it particularly when we face difficult times. Make a convincing argument answering this writer's outrage.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. We were told to expect medium-rare filet mignon and exotic fondues. These I was promised. Knifing through the jet stream at 50,000 feet, I would put up my stockinged feet, take my good wife's gloved hand, beam at our Cleaver-perfect children across the wide aisle and doze as we rocketed safely into our future at 600 miles per hour. This is what we were sold. The new magic carpet for the new American leisure class.

Forty years later, we receive instead a $1,200 coach seat half the width of a human pelvis, a mismatched pair of circus peanuts and the in-flight director's recut of "Bicentennial Man." Behold, air rage. This has been the season of discontent for enraged passengers and the various carriers who brand, herd and ship them from point to point.

There is blame to be laid everywhere, of course. Overcrowding lies at the root of most in-flight incivility: more people going more places means more people in line, more people at the gate, more people trying to lever their washer-dryer combos into the overhead bin while more people trapped in the aisle behind them hiss obscenities. More missed connections, more friction, more heat, more anger. We love our easily cataloged two-syllable catch phrases like "road rage" and "air rage," and we lump them together even though they have nearly opposite causes. In the former case, people go crazy with the illusion of vehicular control; in the latter, they're driven crazy because they have no control at all.

The entire system is "maxed out," say the experts. Why? Didn't the Government or you airlines see this coming? Once you deregulate and start offering discount fares, how can you feign surprise when we all show up?

Their smiling commercials and ads neglect to mention certain things. No mention in the fine print of supercilious [demanding; disdainful] flying waitresses or hostile counter clerks or belligerent, drunken seatmates or the complex nature of the hostage-kidnapper relationship that begins once the airplane door closes. To say nothing of the subminiature dinners and the fictional timetables and the arcane calculus whereby your seat always costs $700 more than the one next to it.

But we, the traveling public, are culpable, too. We are still a nation of suckers after all, trapped in the feedback loop of the advertising cycle, forever consuming goods and services in the half-witted belief that the new soap or the new soup or the aisle seat on the exit row will deliver not only scads of lather, beefy goodness and an on-time arrival rate of 98 percent, but a slimmer, sexier, more fully self-actualized identity as well. The worm at the core of it all, as always with humanity, is want. We want what we were promised-we want the transcendent fantasy world technology keeps failing to deliver.

We are boorish, childish passengers with outrageous expectations, self-important, ill behaved, underdressed, over packed and sublimely oblivious to the fact that a jumbo jet was never intended as a high-altitude dinner theatre.

And while you're all going no place special in such a hurry, try to remember that what you're really trapped in is your own perceptions, and that your anger comes from the common American convictions that the laws of physics and the rules of commerce and their consequent indignities apply to everyone but you. So, don't drink so much when you fly, take your elbow off my armrest and cover your mouth when you cough! Because only by recognizing your flaws can I ever hope to overcome them.

Topic: For your essay, briefly summarize MacGregor's point about air travel. Then explain your position on this issue. Is the fault in our planes or in ourselves?

Read the following essays to get an idea of the level of writing an holistic reader (one who uses a criterion-referenced scoring guide such as the WPE Scoring Guide) expects when s/he assigns one of these numeric scores: Six (Exemplary Paper), Five (Proficient Paper), Four (Acceptable Paper--competent but flawed, Three (Failing Paper--inadequate or deficient in more than one area), Two (Seriously Flawed Paper). A One (Ineffectual) is rarely given. Each essay is followed by comments explaining why it has earned the assigned numeric score.