FIRST SUMMATIVE TEST IN CREATIVE NPNFICTION

GRADE 12 HUMSS

Test I
Directions: Identify whether the following is an Autobiography, a Memoir, a Diary or a Journal
_______1. Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama
_______2. I am Malala by Malala Yousafzai
_______3. Long Walk to Freedom=by Nelson Mandela
_______4. Diary of Anne Frank
_______5. Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

Test II
Directions: Identify what is being described or defined in the following statements. Write your answer on the space
provided before the number.
___________1. It combines the validity of facts and the imaginative stance of storytelling.
___________2. This main component of an essay usually contains the thesis statement.
___________3. This main component of an essay provides a fitting ending to the essay.
___________4-5. These are the other terms used for Literary Reportage.
___________6. It is a narrative of the existence of a historical figure written by another writer, usually a historian.
___________7. It is the main rhetorical device or strategy used in a descriptive essay.
___________8. In a ________ description expression involves personal views, even when it is explained by analysis.
___________9. This is the other term for subjective description.
___________10. It is what a travel writer should hone for him/her to accurately describe what has been seen, smelled,
tasted, touched and heard.
___________11. It is the first thing a person should do to become a successful food writer.
___________12. As a literary genre, it is highly dependent on scientific facts and figures about the natural world.
___________13. It normally concentrates on a single aspect of a featured person’s life.
___________14. It indicates his or her name, current and past occupations, academic institutions attended, and other
pertinent and not-so-pertinent info.
___________15. It is an update feature which allows users to express their thoughts, whereabouts or important
information with their friends.

Test III
Directions: Below is an example of Character Sketch Write a commentary about the entry. Your output will be rated
based on the rubric that follows.

Elsa Martinez Conscolluela (In Six Sketches of Filipino Women Writers)

(an excerpt)
By Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo

Elsa Martinez Conscolluela tells me that these days her life is very quiet. We are sitting in the dining room of the
Casino EspaÒol, empty now, because the other participants of the NCCA literature festival that we are both attending
have dispersed to the different session rooms We gave stayed behind so we can have this chat.
She lives alone, with just her household staff, though her middle son lives next door. Elsie tells me. “I’m semi-
retired, you know,” she adds. What she means is that she has stepped down from her former position as Vice President for
Academic Affairs of the University of St. La Salle in Bacolod.
But I know that the university has made her Special Projects Director and Professor Emeritus. So, I ask her to describe a
typical day in her life.
Elise tells me that she rises at around six every morning, has a coffee, and spends an hour or so in her garden.
Then she sits down to breakfast and a long bath. By nine or nine-thirty she is at work. Usually, there are meetings and
people to see, and lots of papers on her desk. “Special Projects” covers a large range of activities, affirm managing a
master’s program for police officers throughout the province to running the University Press. There is a skills training
program for out-of-school youth, both funded by the Eduardo Cojuangco Foundation and supported by local government
units; supervising and expanding the university’s Institute for Culinary Arts, which was founded two years earlier, and
which is now pronounced by Elsie to be “a great success.” She’s also in charge of developing new paper product lines for
the internal market; supervising the development of the Eco Park in the university’s 55-hectare extension campus in
Granada; supervising the school for special children, established by the university two years ago. Finally, she drafts new
project proposals and the like.
Lunch Elsie generally takes at the office, except for a weekly lunch date with her best friends – Nana Yulo, Ising
Benedicto, Elsa Streegan, and Maia Ramos, all from USLS.
Before 7 PM, she is home. That’s when she does her homework, if anything urgent. Or she relaxes with a DVD,
until the late news. “But there are times when sleep overtakes me and I miss the late news,” she smiles.
When I say that this doesn’t sound like “semi-retirement” to me, Elise says: “Oh, it’s not as hectic as my schedule
used to be. My days used to be really crammed full. As you can see, I have become a creature of habit.”
 What happens on weekends? I ask.
“Ah, weekends are strictly family days,” she replies, the smile breaking out. “I go marketing on Saturdays, and do
my weekly general housecleaning to the max- am kind of O.C. when it comes to housecleaning and gardening. As in!
After an early dinner I have my weekly spa ritual, unless there is a school event or a dinner date or a social obligation.
Saturdays are the best days of the week. “We have family dinners either at my home, where I prepare the entire
menu, using my mother’s best recipes and then some. Or we got to my eldest son9s house for swimming and dinner.
When that happens, he and my daughters-in-law and I do the cooking for the two other sons and four grandsons, my
mom-in-law, and some very close in-laws and relatives. Sometimes, we stay over to watch the latest movies. So Sunday is
a big family day, a tradition I carry over from both my late mother and my mom-in-law. It9s a simple
life… but a busy one.”
Elsie grows a bit pensive. “You know, I think that because I am actually a free spirit, I decided long ago to
harness my 8freeness9 and turn myself into a disciplined professional as required by career, marriage, motherhood. So I
became really O.C. But when I break free, hala! Then I just laze around. I take a leave and do nothing that matters. As in
hibernate. And sometimes… I write.”
She has just said the key word– writing. I am struck by the fact that she says it is something she does
“sometimes.” But before I can jump in, Elsie continues, “But then I’ve always been a bit reclusive. It was my husband
who was the more sociable one. When he passed away in 2005 from a massive heart attack, my life become quieter. I now
only see my colleagues at La Salle, my old friends.”
The last time Elsie and I were together was 2003, when she hosted the UP Press Book Caravan. But the first time
I had met her was some years earlier, in Davao, where she was one of the speakers at the British Council9s Philippine-
British Literature Conference. I realized then that Elsie Coscolluela wa the Elsa Victoria Martinez that I had heard of (like
each time she won a new Palanca) back when I was myself starting out on my own writing career. She was a striking
woman. Handsome. Elegant. Even perhaps a bit intimidating. Very much one9s idea of the lady of the manor. The fact
that she was also a high-ranking academic administrator seemed like an aberration. But when she spoke, the voice was
soft, the tone lilting, musical. The old-fashioned termed occurred to me– cariñosa. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to spend
much time together that time.
I was touched by the talk she gave, though. She mentioned the difficulty of keeping the faith (as a writer) in
relative isolation, among people who didn9t really see the point. I assumed she meant the hacienda culture of which she
was a part.
Back in the early 860s, writers weren9t as mobile as they are now, communication weren’t as advanced, relations
weren9t as close. So, Elsie and I had never met before. Like Aida Rivera Ford and Tita Lacambra Ayala, who lived in
Davao, Renato Madrid and Resil Mojares who lived in Cebu – much admired writers – she was just a name to us. Only
the Tiempos, and the now legendary writers’ workshop they established in the 860s, brought the south closer to us. Or,
more correctly brought us to the south.
Linda Panlilio, Nening Manahan, and I had gone together to that literature conference. I recall that we were met at
the airport by Chita Galaga-Castillo, and taken for great meals at Bob9s and Pendy9s, where I had my first taste of the
incomparable Bacalod batchoy. And then we were invited to an elegant dinner at the Coscolluela residence.
Later Elsie was to tell me that this was Santa Clara Village, where she and her husband had built a “second
home.” They intended it to be their “retirement home,” which was why the master’s bedroom was on the ground floor,
and it had no windows, a protection against fall ash, since fall ash gives Elsie asthma, and there was “a tiny, cozy kitchen
just a few steps away from the bedroom because I love to cook.”
Their first home – where they lived for twenty-seven years and raised their three sons – is in the Mountainview,
another residential area.
I got to know Elsie a little better in 2003, during the UP Book Caravan, and discovered her to be both very
gracious and very simple. Which for some reason surprised me. What had I expected? I have written of that visit in
another book, Looking for the Philippines (2009).
“Elsie… told me about her student days in Siliman, about how the Tiempos had nurtured her and helped her with
her writing. After graduating with honors, she had gotten a scholarship to Iowa University. But she was too young to be
admitted into its graduate program. So, the Tiempos suggested she enroll for a few courses at La Salle Bacolod, to bide
her time. They hadn9t counted on her falling in love with a Bacolodnon, marrying him, and making Bacolod her home.
But how could it have been otherwise,
given the gorgeous and gifted Elsie?
It had been tough for her in the beginning, she said. “Oh, I had to work so hard to fit in,” she sighed, and the
memory of it clouded her eyes. In her husband’s circles, women weren’t writers.
“And I remembered that poem of hers about the mountain they call Cuernos de Negros:
“The gentle rustle of mountain spirits
Unspool memory as the lamplight leaps
Into a sudden dance: once a child
He had watched his father clearing grass.
Grown child.?”
But it is 2010 now, and we are the Casino Español. Elsie is telling me that she was born in Dumaguete in 1945.
Her father was Celerino Leon Martinez, a lawyer, and her mother, Carmen Cabello, was a teacher of Spanish, and what
Elsie describes as “very religious.”
1. Memoir
2. Autobiography
3. Autobiography
4. Diary
5. Memoir

Let Us Assess!
1. Creative Nonfiction
2. Introduction
3. Concluding Paragraph
4. New Journalism, Literary Journalism
5. New Journalism, Literary Journalism
6. Historical Biography
7. Description
8. Subjective
9. Emotional Description
10. His/her five senses
11. Think of eating as a form of gustatory
adventure.
12. Nature Writing
13.Profile
14.User-profile
15. Facebook Status Report