Has anyone taken the ECE English Composition exam? If so what books did you find the most helpful. The total package of books is a little expensive.. $169.00 . I am enrolled in Excelsior for a number of reason, so the CLEP English Composition with Essay is not an option.
The exam itself is quite similar to the example you can download at the Excelsior College site. I suggest you to buy just two books: - “A writer’s Reference”, by Diana Hacker, Bedford/St. Martin’s (or even the shorter, and cheaper, version by the same author, “A Pocket Style Manual”); - The Excelsior’s “English Composition Course Guide”. The former is especially useful to master the MLA’s guidelines, which are part of the exam, and for a general review of grammar rules. The latter gives you one more complete set of examples for the exam, and explains in details how the tests are scored – understand that, and you will have no problem at all. You should practice a bit in order to be able to complete the three assignments in the allowed time (three hours). Time management, I discovered at my own expenses, it’s quite tricky. Be especially careful to have enough time to complete properly the third part of the exam (Response to the writing sample), which can be tricky. The bottom line is: if you are able to write clearly and without a lot of misspellings and the like, you won’t have any trouble to get the six credits. For the record, English is not my mother tongue (I’m Italian) and I got a C. My main problem was exactly the time management: I did well in the first two parts of the exams, but ran short of time in the third part. Hope it helps. Good luck, Giancarlo
