AP Language and Composition

Tom Foley; Janna Serniak

Course Overview:

An AP course in English Language and Composition engages students in becoming skilled readers of prose written in a variety of periods, disciplines, and rhetorical contexts and in becoming skilled writers who compose for a variety of purposes. Both their writing and their reading should make students aware of the interactions among a writer’s purposes, audience expectations, and subjects as well as the way generic conventions and the resources of language contribute to effectiveness in writing.

Rhetoric - presumes that a speaker or writer is searching for methods to persuade hearers or readers because he or she has something valuable to say, something that arises from his or her position as an honest, inquiring, ethical person.

Therefore in this class we will attempt to…

A. Analyze all the language choices that a writer, speaker, reader or listener might make in a given situation so that the text becomes more meaningful, purposeful, and effective.

B. Look at specific features of texts, written or spoken, that cause them to be meaningful,

purposeful, and effective for readers or listeners in a given situation.

- Roskelley, H., and Jolliffe, D. Everyday Use: Rhetoric at Work in Reading and Writing. 2005.

The course often allows students to write in a variety of forms – narrative, exploratory, expository, argumentative, analytic, comparative – and on a variety of subjects from personal experiences to public policies, from imaginative literature to popular culture.

As in the college course, AP Language’s purpose is to enable students to read complex texts with understanding and to write prose of sufficient richness and complexity to communicate effectively with mature readers. AP English Language and Composition should help students move beyond such programmatic responses as the five-paragraph essay. Students will be encouraged to place their emphasis on content, purpose, and audience and to allow this focus to guide their organization. When students read, they should become aware of how stylistic effects are achieved by writer’s linguistic choices.

The AP Language and Composition course assumes that students already understand and use standard English grammar. The intense concentration on language use in this course should enhance their ability to use grammatical conventions both appropriately and with sophistication as well as to develop stylistic maturity in their prose.

Upon completing the Language and Composition course, then, students should be able to:

• Analyze and interpret samples of good writing, identifying and explaining an author’s use of rhetorical strategies and techniques;

• Apply effective strategies and techniques in their own writing;

• Create and sustain arguments based on readings, research, and/or personal experience;

• Write for a variety of purposes;

• Produce expository, analytical, and argumentative compositions that introduce a complex central idea and develop it with appropriate evidence drawn from primary and/or secondary sources, cogent explanations, and clear transitions;

• Demonstrate understanding and mastery of standard written English as well as stylistic maturity in their own writings;

• Demonstrate understanding of the conventions of citing primary and secondary sources;

• Move effectively through the stages of the writing process, with careful attention to inquiry and research, drafting, revising, editing, and review;

• Write thoughtfully about their own process or composition;

• Revise a work to make it suitable for a different audience;

• Analyze image as text;

• Evaluate and incorporate reference documents into researched papers;

• Develop and use a wide-ranging vocabulary appropriately and effectively;

• Use a variety of sentence structures;

• Use logical organization, enhanced by specific techniques to increase coherence;

• A balance of generalization and specific detail, and;

• An effective use of rhetoric, including controlling tone, establishing and maintaining voice, and achieving appropriate emphasis through diction and sentence structure.

-Advanced Placement Program Professional Development for English Language, The College Board, 2006