Advanced Placement Language and Composition
Advanced Placement Language and Composition
Course Syllabus
Readings and Materials
Bannister, Linda, Ph.D. etal. eds. English Language & Composition.
Piscataway, NJ: Research & Education Association, 2000.
Dunn, Kathleen, etal. eds. Advanced Placement Writing 1.
Rocky River, OH: The Center for Learning, 1997.
Hall, Donald and Sven Birkerts. Writing Well. 9th ed. New York: Longman, 1998.
Hoseini, Khaled. The Kite Runner. New York: Riverhead Books, 2003.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York: Perennial Classics,
1998.
McCarthy, Cormic. All the Pretty Horses. New York: Vintage Books, 1992.
Miller, Arthur. The Crucible. New York: Penguin Books, 1995.
Released AP Exams and Essay Questions
Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. Sylvan Barnet, ed. New York: Signet Classic, 1998.
X.J. Kennedy, et al. eds. The Bedford Reader. 6th ed. Boston: Bedford Books, 1997.
First Marking Period
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
All the Pretty Horses, Cormic McCarthy
The Bedford Reader, selections – students’ choice
Weekly, cumulative vocabulary quiz – 55 words
Released AP Exam Question
“On Seeing England for the First Time”, Jamaica Kincaid (annotation)
Advanced Placement Writing 1
“My First Life Line”, Maya Angelou (autobiography – boldface indicates student
paper assigned)
Sample letters by Twain, Dickinson, and Jenner (letter)
Released AP Exam question – letters by Seaver and Herbert (letter)
“The Whistle”, Benjamin Franklin (anecdote)
Sample prose definitions by Alkon, Gorer, Seligson, and Kirk (definition)
Sample prose definitions by Montagu, Highet, and Toffler (definition)
“Will College Football Perish Like the Dinosaur?” Ralph McGill (analogy)
“The Singing Lesson”, Katherine Mansfield (fiction)
“Early Puritans Replaced by Pursuers of Pleasure”, Douglas Dunkel (invent a topic)
“The San Francisco Earthquake”, Jack London (voice)
Sample introductions by Baer, Morris, Schurenberg, Hassrick, and McLoughlin
(openers)
“Literature and the Schoolma’m”, H.L.Mencken (logic)
Samples from Weltfish, Orwell, and Carson for analysis of emotional content.
“The Death of Benny Paret” (analyze logic and emotion)
“General George Armstrong Custer”, Ralph K Andrist and “My Average Uncle”,
Robert P. Tristram Coffin (contrast diction, tone, and syntax)
Second Marking Period
The Crucible, Arthur Miller
The Kite Runner, Khaled Hoseini
Macbeth, William Shakespeare
The Bedford Reader, selections – students’ choice
Weekly, cumulative vocabulary quiz – 110 words
1997 AP Exam – Practice and Analysis (small groups, untimed)- 3 essays
Released AP Exam Questions
George Orwell on Ghandi (annotation)
Nancy Mairs on being crippled (annotation)
Advanced Placement Writing 1
Excerpt “A Way of Seeing”, Margaret Mead and Rhoda Metraux (writing to the
educated audience)
“The Ring of Time”, E.B. White (imagistic organization)
“The Winds of Words”, George Will (connotative language)
“When Berlitz Is Not Enough”, Margaret Logan (levels of diction)
Samples of figurative language from Emerson and Thoreau (figurative language)
Movie reviews by Ansen and Skow (control of tone)
“Sights and Sounds of America” John Steinbeck (sentence structure)
Excerpt “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” T.E. Lawrence (sentence variety)
Third Marking Period
Documented research and argument paper
Argumentation strategies
Using and citing evidence – MLA format
Logical fallacies and oversimplification
The Bedford Reader
“Politics and the English Language”, George Orwell
“A Modest Proposal”, Jonathan Swift
Weekly, cumulative vocabulary quiz – 165 words
1997 AP Exam Practice – Individuals, untimed – 3 essays
2001 AP Exam Practice – Individuals, timed multiple choice – 3 essays
Released AP Exam Questions
Sample Question Draft – 2005
John Audubon and Annie Dillard on birds (annotation)
Mary Oliver, “Owls” (annotation)
Eudora Welty, from One Writer’s Beginnings (annotation)
Advanced Placement Writing 1
“Farewell to Porridge”, Dan Greenburg (literary style)
Excerpts “Dialogues” Plato and “The Funeral Oration of Pericles”, Thucydides (voices
of antiquity)
Excerpts “Duties of the Individual to the State” Cicero and “Paul’s Letter to the
Romans (voices of antiquity)
Excerpts “General Prologue of Canterbury Tales”, Chaucer and “The Code of chivalry
and Courtly Love”, Tuchman (middle ages – analyze tone)
“In What Manner Princes Ought to Keep Their Words”, Machiavelli, “Of Ambition”,
Bacon, and “Of Studies”, Bacon (Renaissance – analyze purpose)
“A Valediction Forbidding Mourning”, Donne (Baroque – analyze diction as it relates
to tone)
“Why Men Reason So Poorly”, Locke, “A Treatise on Good-Manners and Good-
Breeding”, Swift, excerpt from “An Essay on Man”, Pope (Enlightenment – essay
response to literary prompt)
Excerpts “Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth and Coleridge and “Mr. Wordsworth”, Hazlitt
(Romantic Imagination – annotation)
“The American Scholar”, Emerson (Victorian Values – timed writing practice)
Samples of twentieth century style, Spender, Howe, Pound, Yeats, Clark (modern age
styles)
Fourth Marking Period
1991 AP Exam Practice – Individuals, timed – 3 essays
The Bedford Reader, selections – students’ choice
Released AP Exam Questions
Abraham Lincoln, “Second Inaugural Address” (annotation)
2 passages about Okefenokee Swamp (annotation)
Marian Evans Lewes, letter to Melusina Fay Peirce (annotation)
Advanced Placement Writing 1
Excerpts, “Burned to Death”, Theodore Dreiser and “tossed About on Land Like Ships
in a Storm”, Ernest Hemingway (journalistic style)
Samples of source articles, Atlantic Institute Poll, U.S. News and World Report, E.B.
White, and Rochelle (combine sources in a report)
Excerpt, Black Like Me, John Griffin (rhetoric of reality)
2007 AP Exam – May
College Essay
Film Interpretation
Casablanca – classic fiction
Raising Cain – documentary
Mandala Project (metaphoric thinking)
Evidence per Audit Request
1. The course requires students to write essays that proceed through several stages or drafts, with revision aided by teacher and peers. Evidence: Each marking period, students use the writing process to complete one of the essays. This entails prewriting, drafting, revision workshops (peer revision) at the global, intermediate, and focal levels, pre-final and post-final teacher conferences, and a final draft. The drafts are evaluated by a rubric, specific to the revision focus of the paper. Typically, the four papers that proceed through these stages are: autobiography, definition, argumentation/research, and an AP practice exam essay response.
2. The course requires nonfiction readings that are selected to give students
opportunities to identify and explain an author’s use of rhetorical strategies
and techniques. If fiction and poetry are also assigned, their main purpose
should be to help students understand how various effects are achieved by
writers’ linguistic and rhetorical choices. Evidence: Several specific nonfiction selections are listed in the syllabus. Additional nonfiction selections are assigned in The Bedford Reader. These are analyzed in essays, by answering questions about language, strategy, and rhetoric, or by annotation. Fiction is selected specifically for the unique writing strategies employed by the authors, and students are required to analyze the effects of those strategies on multiple choice and short essay tests.
3. The course teaches students to analyze how graphics and visual images both
relate to written texts and serve as alternative forms of text themselves.
Evidence: Students apply graphics and visual images to written text by
completing the documented essay question on three AP exam practices that include graphic sources. The Mandala project requires students to think metaphorically and draw archetypical images. Also, students analyze film techniques in a classic drama (Casablanca) and a documentary (varies).
4. The course teaches research skills, and in particular, the ability to evaluate, use,
and cite primary and secondary sources. The course assigns projects such as
the researched argument paper, which goes beyond the parameters of a
traditional research paper by asking students to present an argument of their
own that includes the analysis and synthesis of ideas from an array of sources.
Evidence: Students write an 8 to10 page argument that is documented in MLA
style by no fewer than 5 sources. One source must be primary and two sources
must be non-electrical. Students complete an evaluation on the credibility of
their sources. (Wikepedia, for example, is excluded as an acceptable source.)
This paper follows the various stages of the writing process, including a pre and
post draft conferences. Students are graded by a rubric that specifies strategies of
argumentation, effective use of sources, and correct MLA documentation style.
5. The AP teacher provides instruction and feedback on students’ writing assignments, both before and after the students revise their work, that help the students develop these skills: 1. A wide-ranging vocabulary used appropriately and effectively. Evidence: In addition to the weekly vocabulary tests and discussions of vocabulary in the daily exercises, students meet, each marking period, to discuss the diction in their papers. Specific attention is given to the formality of the paper and the vocabulary that best suits the level of diction required. 2. A variety of sentence structures, including appropriate use of subordination and coordination. Evidence: In addition to sentence exercises, assigned in the Writing Well text, students are asked to count the number of words they use in the first ten sentences of their drafts. They are also asked to label the structure of their sentences (simple, compound, complex, compound-complex). This analysis is discussed during conferences to ensure sentence variety. 3. Logical organization, enhanced by specific techniques to increase coherence, such as repetition, transitions, and emphasis. Evidence: In addition to exercises on the use of transitional expressions and coherent conjunctions and prepositions, assigned in the Writing Well text, students are asked to identify overt and covert (internal) transitions in their paragraphs. Repetition and periodic sentences, used for emphasis (particularly for effective endings) are discussed during conferences. 4. A balance of generalization and specific, illustrative detail. Evidence: In addition to exercises about supporting details and thesis statements, students are asked to identify assertions, warrants, and evidence in their papers. Students are asked to write deductive and inductive paragraphs. Students are required to support their assertion in the argument paper with both hard and soft evidence.
6. An effective use of rhetoric, including controlling tone, establishing and
maintaining voice, and achieving appropriate emphasis through diction and
sentence structure. Evidence: Specific assignments (listed in the syllabus)
include writing to a particular audience (adjusting tone and diction accordingly),
evaluating the logical, emotional and linguistic content of a message, writing to
an educated audience, writing the same selection from different viewpoints using
connotative language, and analyzing levels of diction in a variety of selections.
As with the use of parallel structure and periodic sentences to achieve coherence,
students employ these and other strategies (i.e. chiasmus, zeugma, polysyndeton,
epistrophe, symploche, and anadiplosis etc.) to achieve specific effects.
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