Five Points for AP English Language Review

Five Points for AP English Language Review

Overall

1. Get a good night’s sleep.
2. Eat breakfast!  Yes, there are extensive studies to prove that students score higher on tests if they eat breakfast. Why do you think the school serves free breakfast to juniors before exit exams?
3. Get to the test site early so you have time to calm down and prepare for the test.
4. Use the entire allotted time on the test. Don’t finish early. Go back and look at difficult multiple-choice questions or proofread, edit, and revise essays. Ignore other students who succumb to senioritis and rush through the exam.
5. If a section of the test is extremely difficult, SMILE and persevere because that means you have a much better chance of making a higher score if you charge ahead. Many, many other students will let the test defeat them and skip or rush through difficult sections. Take your time and accept the challenge!

Multiple-Choice

1. How well did you manage time during practice exams? If you had remaining free time at the end of the exams, slow down on the real exam and read each selection twice. If you struggled to finish within the time constraints, it might help you to omit one section of multiple choice and concentrate on the other passages. If you omit a section, omit the oldest section or the section with the fewest number of questions.
2. Don’t forget to read quotations in context. If you are asked a question over lines 32-35 of a text, start reading at least two lines about line 32 and continue reading at least two lines after line 35.
3. Do not allow one question to take too much time. Circle the item and return to it at the end of the test if you have remaining time.
4. Don’t forget that the multiple-choice questions are NOT graded for difficulty. The most difficult question may be #1, and the easiest question may be the final question. Don’t spend so much time on the first section that you never get to easier questions later on the test.
5. Make sure that you look at notes at the end of passages. Often you may learn information about the time period or author that may make the passage easier to comprehend.

Synthesis Question

1. As soon as you receive your packet, write MYAC in big letters across the top of the page:  MAKE YOUR ARGUMENT CENTRAL!  This should help you remember that the readers want to see someone who can have a conversation with the sources. Do not summarize!  That is an easier writing skill. If you summarize all sources, you might have a very good 6-page summary, but your grade will probably be a 4 or lower.
2. Read the introduction and assignment carefully. Some people read only the introduction to the topic and miss the assignment. Make sure you know what you should write about before you begin writing.
3. Pay attention to the minimum number of required sources and make sure you include that many. If you write a splendid essay but do not use enough sources, you cannot receive a grade above a 4.  You do not receive extra points for exceeding the number of sources.
4. Document all sources through lead-ins or parenthetical documentation.
5. Watch the prompt carefully. Are you supposed to take a stand and persuade someone? Are you supposed to look at both sides of an issue? Follow the directions!

Rhetorical Analysis

1. Historically, this is the essay where national averages are lowest; therefore, this is the essay where you can score big points! Spend the full 40 minutes here even if you find the prompt difficult.
2. Write the following words at the top of your rhetorical analysis as soon as you get the green booklet:  TONE, ETHOS (Do we trust the author? Why?)  Pathos (What effect does the passage have on the reader? Why? How does the author do this?) and Logos (How does the author use logic to make his point?). Consider these ideas and see if they fit within the prompt.
3. Read the prompt carefully to determine what you are supposed to do. Are you supposed to explain how the author makes his argument?  If so, tell what he is doing in each section of the passage. Are you supposed to analyze rhetorical devices? If so, choose 2 or 3 and explain what he does and WHY. What effect do these rhetorical devices have on the passage?
4. If you are absolutely lost and have no idea what to do, tell what the author is doing in each paragraph and try to make at least a 5 on the rhetorical analysis. As you dissect and write about each paragraph, you may uncover the idea the readers want you to find. If you then have a flash of understanding, include this understanding in your conclusion.
5. Quote from the passage!  Usually, you will quote only parts of sentences or words. Do not quote large sections of a passage. You do NOT need to cite line numbers.

Open Question

1. Read the prompt carefully so that you know what to do. Are you supposed to look at both sides of an issue or just advance your position? Read carefully!
2. Are you allowed to bring in outside examples? If so, include several scholarly examples. If you have to, you can use personal examples, but the higher scores generally go to students who bring in examples from current events, history, science, politics, etc.
3. Your writing must shine on the open argument question. Use some of the rhetorical devices (repetition, rhetorical questions, figurative language) that you have learned this year.
4. Provide DEPTH to your argument. If you provide only a surface analysis, your grade will be lower. This is why you need to use the full time provided for the test.
5. A longer paper that is well-written and on subject almost always will receive a higher score than a shorter paper. Once again, use the full allotted time for the test!

Syntax

Consider:


When I am too sad and too skinny to keep keeping, when I am a tiny thing against so many bricks, then it is I look at trees.

Sandra Cisneros, The house on Mango Street


1. What kind of grammatical structure is repeated in this sentence?  What is the effect of the repetition?
2. This is a periodic sentence, a sentence which DELAYS the subject and verb to the end.  What idea is emphasized by the END-FOCUS in this sentence?




Consider:
She is a woman who misses moisture, who has always loved low green hedges and ferns.
Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

1. Both of the subordinate clauses in this sentence MODIFY woman.  What effect does this PARALLEL STRUCTURE have on the sentence?


2.  How would it change the feeling evoked by the sentence if it read:
She misses moisture and has always loved low green hedges and ferns.

AP Language & Composition  
Rhetoric, Modes of Discourse, Exposition The Art of Rhetoric
Rhetoric, whether spoken or written, is the art of using language effectively to inform and persuade. It includes the use of three types of appeal to the audience and can be divided into five categories or canons. Most analysis is focused on style. However, it is important to be aware of the other four canons as well as the writer or speaker’s use of appeals.
Rhetorical Appeals
Ethos
One’s credibility as a speaker and writer.
Logos
The intellectual power of one’s speech or writing.
Pathos
The emotional power of one’s speech or writing.


The Five Rhetorical Canons
Invention
Selection of the best pattern for one’s purpose: ~analogy ~cause and effect ~classification or division ~comparison and contrast ~definition ~example or illustration ~process analysis
Arrangement
Organization of writing or speech: ~cause and effect ~chronological ~comparison and contrast ~flash back or flash forward ~general to specific (or specific to general)
~least to most important (or most to least) ~spatial
Style
Artful expression of ideas: ~detail ~diction ~figures of speech ~imagery ~syntax ~tone
Memory
Devices that make speech or writing memorable: ~acronym ~pattern of three ~repetition
Delivery
Conscious use of gesture, expression, and pacing.

Common Figures of Speech
Figures of Speech: Tropes
Artful deviation from ordinary or principal signification of a word.
Figures of Speech: Schemes
Artful deviation from the ordinary arrangement of words.
Reference to one thing as another • Metaphor
• Simile • Synecdoche • Metonymy
Word play/puns • Personification •    Syllepsis (zeugma) • Onomatopoeia
Overstatement/understatement • Hyperbole
• Litotes Semantic Inversions
•    Rhetorical question • Irony • Oxymoron • Paradox
Structures of balance • Parallelism
• Antithesis Omission
• Ellipsis
•    Asyndeton (polysyndeton) Repetition
• Alliteration • Assonance • Anaphora • Chiasmus


The Traditional Four Modes of Discourse
Exposition is the most commonly used of the traditional modes of discourse. Expository writing sets out to present ideas in a clear, straightforward, objective manner. The most commonly used methods of development in expository writing are analogy, cause and effect, classification, comparison and contrast, definition, illustration, and process analysis.
Argument attempts to persuade a reader to accept the writer’s viewpoint or position. Logical argument appeals to the reason or intellect of the reader while persuasive argument appeals primarily to the reader’s emotions and often elicits a call to action or a change in a reader’s belief. Logical argument uses three methods to develop a position: induction, deduction, and analogy.
Narration tells a story or presents a sequence of events which occurred over a period of time. If the story is significant in itself, it is narration. If a story illustrates a point in exposition or argument, it may be called illustrative narration. If a story outlines a process step-by-step, it is designated as expository narration.
Description presents factual information about an object or experience (objective description) or reports an impression or evaluation of an object or experience (subjective description. Most description combines two purposes. It was a frightening night. (An evaluation with which others might disagree.) The wind blew the shingles off the north side of the house and drove the rain under the door. (Two facts about which there can be little disagreement).

The Range of Exposition
Expository writing includes writing as familiar and as ephemeral as daily newspaper stories and magazine articles and as monumental as the philosophical works of Aristotle, the history of Gibbon, or the science of Darwin. Exposition also includes technical writing such as is found in an encyclopedia and in business and engineering reports.
Expository writing also includes non-fiction personal writing such as journals, diaries, and essays of individual experience and opinion, of which Montaigne, Thoreau, Orwell, E.B. White, James Baldwin, Joan Didion, and Virginia Woolf are notable practitioners. It is this branch of exposition, the personal experience essay, sometimes also called "Creative NonFiction," with which we are mainly concerned in this course.
This kind of personal essay naturally transforms itself into the higher-level journalism characteristic of such a publication as The New York Times Magazine. The essential difference between "expository" writing and fictional short stories is that everything narrated in a piece of "expository" writing must be absolutely and literally true. The events MUST have actually happened and have happened where you say they happened and how you say they happened and when you say they happened.    Nothing can be "made up."    But otherwise, the techniques needed for good fiction are the same as those needed for good creative non-fiction---vivid storytelling, suspense, pace, scene setting, characterization, organic structure, sound themes, irony, figurative language, style and the fundamental secret of superior expository creative non-fiction writing, what I call “literal symbolism,” where a real event is made into a symbol for an entire class of events. All the resources of verbal and literary expression you will be practicing for expository writing are identical to those you might use in writing a good short story, except that exposition claims to be literally true whereas short stories do not. A good many of the devices are also applicable to poetry, though, of course, exposition is in prose, not verse.
--Harlan Underhill, adapted from Modern Rhetoric “If fiction is a world, nonfiction is the world. In the end all writing is about the
business of being human.”
--William Sloan, The Craft of Writing

Analogy is a method of development that explains something abstract or difficult to understand by comparing it to something simpler and more concrete, with which the reader is likely to be familiar.
Cause and Effect is a seemingly simple method of development in which either the cause of a particular effect or the effects of a particular cause are investigated. However, because of the philosophical difficulties surrounding causality, the writer should be cautious in ascribing causes.
Classification/Division is the division of a whole into the classes that comprise it; or the placement of a subject into the whole of which it is a part.
Comparison and Contrast is the presentation of a subject by indicating similarities between two or more things (comparison); by indicating differences (contrast). The basic elements in a comparative process, then, are (1) the terms of the comparison, or the various objects compared, and (2) the points of likeness or difference between the objects compared. Often comparison and contrast are used in definition and other methods of exposition.
Definition, in logic, is the placing of the word to be defined in a general class and then showing how it differs from other members of the class; in rhetoric, it is the meaningful extension (usually enriched by the use of detail, concrete illustration, anecdote, metaphor) of a logical definition in order to answer fully, clearly, and often implicitly the question, “What is _____ ?”
Example/Illustration is the use of a particular member of a class to explain or dramatize a class, a type, a thing, a person, a method, an idea, or a condition. The idea explained may be either stated or implied. For purposes of illustration, the individual member of a class must be a fair representation of the distinctive qualities of the class. The use of illustrations, examples, and specific instances adds to the concreteness and vividness of writing.
Process Analysis (enumeration) is a method of exposition by logical sequence, applicable to any process, from mining coal to writing a poem. Processes may be described technically and factually or impressionistically and selectively. In the latter method the steps in the sequence are organized in relation to a single governing idea so that the mutually supporting function of each of the components in the total structure becomes clear to the reader. Processes may be explained in terms of their characteristic function. Analysis may also be concerned with the connection of events; given this condition or series of conditions, what effects will follow.
--Adapted from The Essay by Michael F. Shugrue (1981)