AP English
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction to this Guide .............................................................................................................. 1 The Basics of Good Writing ......................................................................................................... 3 AP English Literature ....................................................................................................................... 1 Introduction to the AP English Literature Exam.......................................................................... 2 The Basics of Literature ............................................................................................................... 3 Section One: The Foundation .................................................................................................. 3 Section Two: The Basic Elements ............................................................................................ 7 Section Three: Using the Basic Elements to Answer Questions............................................ 10 Key Take-Aways ..................................................................................................................... 12 Quiz ........................................................................................................................................ 13 Literary Analysis ........................................................................................................................ 20 Introduction ........................................................................................................................... 20 Advanced Literary Analysis: Part One ................................................................................... 20 Advanced Literary Analysis: Part Two ................................................................................... 26 Key Take-Aways ..................................................................................................................... 36 Quiz ........................................................................................................................................ 38
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Poetry ........................................................................................................................................ 45 Reading Poetry ...................................................................................................................... 45 Key Take-Aways ..................................................................................................................... 56 Quiz ........................................................................................................................................ 57 Free-Response Questions.......................................................................................................... 63 Formulating Your Answers to the Free Response Questions ................................................ 63 Key Take-Aways ..................................................................................................................... 74 Quiz ........................................................................................................................................ 75 AP English Language ..................................................................................................................... 80 Introductions ............................................................................................................................. 81 Analyzing Non-Fiction Texts ...................................................................................................... 82 Key Take-Aways ..................................................................................................................... 94 Quiz ........................................................................................................................................ 95 The Tools of Persuasion .......................................................................................................... 103 Key Take-Aways ................................................................................................................... 120 Quiz ...................................................................................................................................... 121 The Free Response Questions ................................................................................................. 129 The Synthesis Question ....................................................................................................... 130 The Rhetorical Analysis ........................................................................................................ 136
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The Argument ...................................................................................................................... 142 Key Take-Aways ................................................................................................................... 146 Quiz ...................................................................................................................................... 147 Practice Test ................................................................................................................................ 152 AP English Literature ............................................................................................................... 153 AP English Language ................................................................................................................ 184 Excerpts ....................................................................................................................................... 218 The Basics of Literature: Key Take-Aways ............................................................................... 219 Excerpt from “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce ........................... 221 Excerpt from D. H. Lawrence’s novel The Rainbow ............................................................ 222 Literary Analysis: Key Take-Aways .......................................................................................... 224 Excerpt from The Moods by W. B. Yeats ............................................................................. 225 Excerpt from “The Red Room” by H. G. Wells ..................................................................... 225 Excerpt from Dracula by Bram Stoker ................................................................................. 226 Excerpt from When I Have Fears by John Keats .................................................................. 227 Excerpt from Mezzo Cammin by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ........................................ 228 Poetry: Key Take-Aways .......................................................................................................... 230 Excerpt from She Walks in Beauty by Lord Byron ............................................................... 231 Excerpt from Sonnet 55 by William Shakespeare ............................................................... 232
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Free Response Questions: Key Take-Aways ............................................................................ 233 Excerpt from President John F. Kennedy’s “Moon Speech” ............................................... 233 Analyzing Non-Fiction Texts: Key Take-Aways ........................................................................ 235 Excerpt from Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech by Edward Sapir ........... 235 Excerpt from The Poetry of Architecture by John Ruskin ................................................... 237 The Tools of Persuasion: Key Take-Aways .............................................................................. 239 Excerpt from a speech given by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Congress ........... 240 Excerpt from Commentaries on the Laws of England by William Blackstone .................... 242 Excerpt from Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address ........................................................ 243 The Free Response Questions: Key Take-Aways ..................................................................... 245 Excerpt from “An Epithalamion, or Marriage Song on the Lady Elizabeth and Count Palatine Being Married on St. Valentine’s Day” by John Donne ....................................................... 246 Excerpt from Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte .............................................................. 247 Excerpt from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad............................................................. 248 Excerpt from After Apple Picking by Robert Frost .............................................................. 249 Excerpt from My Antonia by Willa Cather........................................................................... 251 Excerpt from The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane ............................................... 252 Excerpt from The World Is Too Much with Us by William Wordsworth ............................ 253 Excerpt from The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne .................................................. 254
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Excerpt from “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman .................................. 255 Excerpt from Moonrise by Gerard Manley Hopkins........................................................... 257 Excerpt from A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen ...................................................................... 257 Excerpt from Hospital Sketches by Louisa May Alcott ........................................................ 259 Excerpt from Franz Liszt’s Life of Chopin, translated by Martha Walker Cook ................... 260 Excerpt from the essay “Optimism” by Helen Keller........................................................... 262 Excerpt from B. Granville Baker’s From a Terrace in Prague .............................................. 263 Excerpt from Mary Mills Patrick’s Sextus Empiricus and Greek Scepticism ....................... 264 Excerpt from Robert Steele’s The Earliest Arithmetics in English ....................................... 266 Excerpt from Marion Foster’s Study of Child Life................................................................ 268 Synthesis Free Response Question ......................................................................................... 270 Rhetorical Analysis Free Response Question .......................................................................... 275 Argument Free Response Question ........................................................................................ 277
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INTRODUCTION TO THIS GUIDE Welcome to this guide to the AP English tests. It is important for you to understand that there are actually two separate AP English tests. One of the tests is AP English Language and Composition, and the other test is AP English Literature and Composition. Students usually take only one test per year. This guide contains material that will help you to be prepared to do your best on both tests. Taking AP exams is a great idea—you can earn college credit while you are still in high school. Also, you can show that you are already capable of completing college-level work, which may help you gain admission to college. To register for an AP exam, you can visit the College Board website. Unlike most other standardized tests, the AP exams are only offered once per year, so you will need to plan ahead. The exam is scored on a five-point scale, meaning that your score on the exam will be a one, two, three, four, or five. Each college makes its own determination as to if it will award college credit for an AP exam as well as what score you need to get on the exam in order to earn that credit. You should know that the AP exam does not deduct points for questions that you answer incorrectly. This means that it is to your advantage to answer every single question on the test, so you should guess if you are not sure of an answer. Try not to leave any questions blank.
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Here is one tip that will help you on both of the AP English tests: before you answer any of the questions, read all of the questions. The reason for this is that sometimes a question will give you some useful background information about the passage or poem that will help you understand it better. For example, perhaps one of the questions asks, “What function does the rhetorical question in line five serve?” Maybe it wasn’t clear to you when you were reading the passage that that was, in fact, a rhetorical question, so reading this information in one of the test questions can provide you with helpful information that will help you understand the passage better. We will now review the basics of good writing since both of the exams require you to write several essays. This means that you need to review this material and refine your writing ability regardless of which AP English test you plan on taking. After this section on the basics of good writing, the guide is divided into two sections: one for the English Literature exam and one for the English Language exam. You only need to study the section for the test you plan on taking. At the end of the guide is a practice test with one hundred questions: the first fifty cover the Literature exam and the second fifty cover the Language exam. One final note: all of the reading passages in this guide are also included in the PDF packet.
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THE BASICS OF GOOD WRITING Both the AP English Literature and the AP English Language tests contain free response questions. Your response to each of these questions will be an essay. This means that in order to earn a top score on the exam, you will need to write a respectable essay. In this section, we will review the basics of good writing so that you are prepared for the mechanical aspects of the writing task. In later sections of this guide, we will review the various writing prompts and how you should respond to them. But in this section, we are focusing on the general skills of proficient writing. First, a word about handwriting. You will be writing these essays by hand on paper that is provided to you. This means that your handwriting will be seen by the grader. It is your choice as to whether to write in print or in cursive. You should use whichever style is more comfortable for you. But you need to be sure that your handwriting is as easy to read as possible. Now, your score will not be directly affected by your handwriting. However, the graders have only a short amount of time for each essay, and you do not want to write in a way that is annoying or difficult to read. So while you need to be aware of your own time constraints when you are writing the essays, you also need to write as neatly as possible. It is acceptable to cross things out in your essays if you need to, but, again, you should do this as neatly as possible. You will write three essays regardless of which AP English exam you are taking. Let’s begin by discussing timing strategy. Writing three essays in two hours means that you will have forty minutes per essay. It is a good idea for you to write a few essays with a forty-minute timer before you take the actual AP exam so that you will develop a sense of how long forty minutes is. The AP website includes many of the writing prompts from previous years, so you can use those to practice writing essays. If possible, ask a teacher or another adult to read your essay and give you feedback on what you have written. You will want to have a plan of attack for writing the essays. You should divide your time into four sections for each essay: reading and brainstorming, organizing, writing, and editing. A 3
problem that many students face is that they devote too much time to brainstorming and organizing, and they run out of time before they finish writing, let alone editing. You can divide your forty minutes per essay any way that you would like, but you need to have a plan that allows at least a few minutes to edit. Let’s turn to the topic of grammar, usage, and spelling. The AP exam graders understand that you will write the essay in forty minutes and that you will not have access to a dictionary or proofreader. So you do not need to worry if there is a misspelled word or a misplaced comma. That said, errors that interfere with your ability to communicate, or multiple errors, or errors on very basic principles, can result in a lower score. You should be sure that you spell correctly any words that are in the writing prompt or the passage, especially the name of the author and any characters and literary terms. Do not devote too much time to pondering your spelling, but as you edit, you should be sure that you haven’t made basic errors such as using the wrong form of “there” or “its.” Also, when you edit, you should be paying attention to your punctuation to be sure that you do not have run-on sentences, sentence fragments, or misplaced or missing commas, but you do not need to obsess over this. One way that you can prepare is to pay extra attention to any feedback that you get on your school papers related to spelling and grammar. Use these as a guide to focus on topics where you need to practice more. It is also helpful if you display a wide and sophisticated vocabulary when you write. There are several ways that you can learn new vocabulary words. One of the best ways is to read works that are a little bit challenging to you. You may also want to make flashcards—either paper or digital—as you encounter words that you do not know so that you can study them. Also, you can study Greek and Latin root words—this is one of the most effective ways to enhance your vocabulary. There are many online resources that can help you to do this. There is one particular aspect of your vocabulary that requires special concern for this test: because most of the essay prompts require you to analyze what others have written, you will write many sentences which describe what the author uses and does. But the words “uses” and “does” are basic, dull words. You should spend some time thinking of synonyms for these verbs that you can use on the exam to give both spice and variety to your writing. So instead of saying 4
that the author “uses” a metaphor, you can say that the author deploys, provides, extends, creates, presents, suggests, or unravels a metaphor. Other interesting verbs that could find a place in your essays include invokes, exemplifies, compares, refutes, argues, documents, demonstrates, stirs, elucidates, highlights, manipulates, elicits, evokes, differentiates, emphasizes, explains, portrays, describes, asserts, details, suggests, reveals, clarifies, and depicts. It is also beneficial to use a wide variety of sentence structures. Here is an example of writing that is unlikely to earn a high score: The author uses irony. He also uses imagery. He also uses good word choice. Those three sentences all have the same boring, simple format. To earn a top score, you’ll need to use a variety of interesting sentence structures. Think about this example, which conveys the same information in a more sophisticated way: The author’s irony, imagery, and word choice fuel his exploration of marital strife. There is one other grammatical matter that deserves special attention. It is the use of unclear antecedents. Let’s start with a sample sentence: Jane gave Latoya her book. In that sentence, the antecedent of “her” is unclear: is the book the property of Jane or the property of Latoya? The reason that the use of unclear antecedents can become an issue on the AP exam is that an unclear antecedent can suggest unclear thinking. Consider these sample sentences that might be included in a student’s free response: Dickenson uses both meter and syntax in order to nuance her thinking. This shows that her message about taking risks is well-grounded in the narrator’s experience. In that sample, to what does “this” refer? It could refer to any of the following: meter, syntax, meter and syntax, or her thinking. The essay grader has no way to know what the writer
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intended. The most likely conclusion that the grader will reach is that the writer is not entirely sure which of those possible elements was intended. It reads as if the writer is trying to hide the fact that he or she is not entirely sure about how the poem functions. To avoid this problem, you will want to be sure that your antecedents are very clear. You also need to be careful to introduce quotations properly. For many of the essays, you will want to quote directly from the passage. This is acceptable. You need to ensure that if you are going to use any of the words that are in the passage that you put them in quotation marks. Additionally, if you were to quote an entire sentence, that sentence should not be its own sentence in your essay. Rather, you need to introduce the sentence so that the grader knows why you are including it. For example, before you include the quoted sentence, you might write something like this: The author’s moderate tone is evident when she writes . . . Or This penchant for consonance is evident when the narrator exclaims . . . So, remember, if you use any words from the passage, they need to be in quotation marks, and quotations should always be introduced using your own words to explain how the quotation is relevant to your analysis of the passage. A common mistake on the AP English exam is that students make reference to the literary techniques and tools of persuasion in an unsophisticated way. Now, don’t worry at this point if you aren’t feeling particularly knowledgeable about what exactly these literary techniques and tools of persuasion are, because we are going to review them in detail later in this guide. For now, the issue is whether you are writing about them in a mature voice. Consider this example: He uses unusual syntax to show that Cecelia is confused.
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Now, the idea here is solid: what you want to do on the AP exam is show how the author uses tools to create certain effects. But the way that it is written is not great. First, it features the very boring verb “uses.” Second, the sentence structure is pretty dull. Compare this sentence: His unusual syntax highlights Cecelia’s confusion. Notice that this sentence expresses the same idea but in a more sophisticated way. You aren’t calling as much attention to the fact that you were able to identify the unusual syntax; instead, you are emphasizing how the syntax accomplishes the author’s goal. This makes your writing voice sound more mature, because the focus isn’t on you, as if you were saying, “Look at me! I can find unusual syntax!” Instead, it is low key about your own abilities, while still clearly revealing them. The focus of the second sample sentence is on the effect of the syntax. The sentence is shorter, and it has a more vivid verb. This concludes our review of the basics of good writing and the introduction to this book.
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ARGUMENT FREE RESPONSE QUESTION
The nineteenth-century minister and abolitionist Theodore Parker wrote, “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.” A century later, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., would say, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” In a well-reasoned essay, develop a position on the idea of the universal having a moral arc that bends toward justice. Be sure to use evidence to support your position.
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