AP English III

Language and Composition

Scott Poe

2007-2008AP English III – Language and Composition

Course Description

Because college writing demands the student come prepared to write for a variety of subjects and to demonstrate preparedness in the use of expository, analytical, and argumentative composition skills, AP English Language and Composition represents a diverse curriculum designed to move students to the next academic level. The purpose of this course is aligned with the purpose of the College Board goals for AP English Language and Composition which states, “to enable students to read complex texts with understanding and to write prose of sufficient richness and complexity to communicate effectively with mature readers?

Reading: In alignment with the Kentucky Core Content, this course will survey North American Literature exploring a variety of genres. Reading for the course will include prose written in a variety of periods, disciplines, and rhetorical contexts in addition to numerous selections from multimedia, i.e. propaganda, political cartoons, satirical comics, music videos, movies, advertisements, paintings, photographs and even computer-mediated communication sources. Students will analyze and respond to the world around them and learn to demonstrate an understanding of the history of North American Literature and its evolution.Reading content also includes both primary and secondary sources and requires students learn to synthesize information into compositions and properly cite the sources gaining a comprehensive knowledge of the accepted style sheets of the Modern Language Association (MLA).

Writing: This course requires expository, analytical, and argumentative writing assignments that are based on readings representing a wide variety of prose styles and genres. To meet that requirement, students will gain confidence and learn to write effectively both across the curriculum and for the real world environment. The course will guide the student to place their learning focus on developing content, understanding purpose and appreciating audience. Writing tasks are designed to give students the practice necessary to make them writers who can compose in different modes and for different purposes. Students will read and analyze AP English Language Released Exams and sample essays from apcentral.collegeboard.com to gain self-awareness and confidence in the “how” to write. Frequent writing conferences and peer reviews for all major essays are planned to support student’s efforts to improve their writing. In addition to major essays, students will keep a dialectic journal on all readings and participate in a researchproject which includes significant reading and writing as well as visual interpretation.

This course will encompass all rhetorical modes: patterns of organization aimed at achieving a particular effect in the reader.

  • Narration and Description: modes whose primary purpose is stirring the reader's emotions.
  • Process analysis
  • Cause/Effect, Comparison/Contrast, Illustration, Definition, and Classification/Division: aim at helping readers understand a subject, exploring its functions, causes, consequences, relationships to other subjects, meaning, or nature.
  • Argumentative and Persuasive: seek to change readers' attitudes or actions with regard to specific subjects

Language: In developing sophisticated reading and writing skills, students explore and describe how language works. They learn to observe and analyze the words, patterns, and structures that create subtle effects of language. They learn to describe language, demonstrating working knowledge of parts of speech, structural patterns, awareness of connotation and shades of meaning in context.

Purpose and Modes of Discourse

as writers, students will:

  • employ a variety of rhetorical structures appropriate for various purposes and audiences;
  • subordinate parts to an effective whole and create appropriate transitions between them;
  • adopt the conventions of the appropriate discipline or discourse community when writing for a particular audience.

as readers, students will:

  • identify the purpose and modes of discourse and explain their relationship to rhetorical structure;
  • explain how the parts of discourse are related to each other and to the whole;
  • recognize the conventions of different genres and historical periods, and identify the assumptions authors have made about their audiences.

The Development of Discourse

as writers students will:

  • gather information and ideas, discover patterns, and develop their sense of purpose;
  • select and arrange information and ideas effectively for given purposes and modes of discourse;
  • communicate ideas and experiences to an intellectually sophisticated audience.

as readers students will:

  • recognize main ideas and purposes and explain inferences about an author's intentions;
  • evaluate the connections between ideas at different levels of generality, including the adequacy of evidence;
  • evaluate the value and validity of the writer's message in relation to its historical, social, or cultural context.

The Language of Discourse

as writers students will:

  • shape language in a variety of rhetorical patterns so that sentence structure, diction, and figures of speech serve purpose, audience, and strategy;
  • explain how one's choices of language produce intended effects.

as readers students will:

  • discern and describe in an appropriate vocabulary how the arrangement of language creates a voice;
  • identify major devices that control tone and structure; show how they serve rhetorical purposes.

Both the reading and the writing tasks for the course will help students gain textual power, making them more alert to an author's purpose, the needs of an audience, the demands of subject, and the resources of language: syntax, word choice, and tone. By the late spring of the school year, students will have nearly completed a course in effective writing and critical reading. The writing skills that students learn to appreciate through close and continued analysis of a wide variety of prose texts can serve them in their own writing as they grow increasingly aware of these skills and their pertinent uses.

As this is an AP (college-level) course, performance expectations are high, and the workload is challenging. Students are expected to complete a minimum of five hours of course work a week outside of class. Often, work involves long-term writing and reading assignments. Effective time management is important.

Major Assessments

Semester Final Exams

Both exams are cumulative and focus on the –isms of American Literature.

Major writing assignments

Persuasive Speech

On-demand/timed writings

Rhetorical Analysis

This I believe

Personal Reflection on Writing

Transcendentalism notebook

Performance Assessments

Dialectical Journal

ETS Criterion

Because of the tremendous volume of essays that must be graded each year, the class will utilize the ETS Criterion essay scoring service: in brief, for each major writing assignment students will submit drafts to the online service and revise essays based on the immediate feedback provided. Each student will be given the opportunity while online to brainstorm before beginningthe essay draft. For major non-timed writing assignments, a student may not submit a final draft until he or she achieves the highest score possible and addresses the problems identified by the grading service. As the program cannot “read,” it may identify a stylistic “choice” as an error. The student must identify these choices and then explain why he or she chooses to include it in the essay for it to be deemed acceptable. This service will allow students to receive immediate feedback on writing fundamentals so as to allow the teacher more time to provide feedback on style and content.

At home Timed Writings

Every Monday by midnight each student must submit to ETS Criterion two (2) typed rhetorical analysis entries. The assignments will be made available well in advance; students may work ahead as they see fit; however, once the assignment is closed it will not be reopened. It would be wise to print out a hard copy to prevent any unforeseen technical errors. Each submitted essay will be kept in an online portfolio, but when any graded analyses are returned they will keep in the student three-ring binder. Each initial submission will be limited to 40 minutes to replicate the time limits of the AP test; however, after the initial graded submission, students will have two weeks to revise and resubmit until eachstudent is satisfied and request a rescore. It will be the student’s responsibility to revise and resubmit within the two week period, The teacher will not remind students nor will the teacher allow for extensions beyond the 2 week period.

Vocabulary

This class will use a vocabulary list titled Vicious Vocabulary. Every Friday students will be quizzed over 20 words and every 50 words will have a Review quiz.

Rhetoric Journal

Everything received in this class on the subject of writing (grammar, style, tone, revision) along with all work must be kept in a labeled section of a 3-ring AP notebook.

Major Assignments

Persuasive Speech (Rationalism Unit): Based on research of a controversial topic students will prepare and deliver a 6-8 minute persuasive speech. The speech will include a visual aid as well as incorporate three of the six pieces of support found. Students will submit a hard copy that includes proper MLA format for all sources used. This synthesis piece will be the initial exploration of the AP synthesis essay.

Romantic/Transcendental Notebook (Transcendentalism Unit): Students will take selections from Romantic and Transcendental writers and connect the passage to an image that reflects an element of that passage (tone, purpose, theme). This assignment addresses issues of visual literacy and its connection with the written word.

60 Literary Minutes (Realism/Modernism Unit): In an exercise adapted from Prospero’s Magic by Michael Degen, students will assume the roles of characters within the novel and prepare to interview/be interviewed based on textual evidence.

This I believe (Modernism/Post-modernism Unit): This assignment is rooted in the popular NPR series ( students will explore their personal beliefs based on books they’ve read or a personal experience. This personal essay uses the skills necessary to effectively address the “defend, challenge, qualify” AP essay as it requires the student to address the ambiguity of existence and formulate an opinion based in his or her reality.

Create your Own AD: This assignment uses information gained from The Bedford Reader on visual texts then expands by using Ad dissection 101: exposing media manipulation culminating in students creating an ad of their own and “pitching” their ad campaign to the class.

Personal Reflection on Writing after having read Stephen King’s On Writing, students will reflect on skills they’ve developed over the year and information gleaned from Crafting Expository Argument and Writing with Style. Students will develop their own memoir on their writing process: from seed of an idea, through the revision process, to final draft.

Dialectal Journal: The purpose of the Response Log is to record the personal reactions toward literary assignments while reading. Personal responses are a major part of the Advance Placement experience! Once readers make reading personal, it is more interesting to learn, and easier to remember. In addition, these responses can be helpful when writing essays. A final benefit to the logs is that they can help facilitate class discussion.

Course Materials

Class Texts and Teacher resources:

A copy of each text will be available in the classroom. ISBN numbers are provided for easy search and purchase online or at local bookstore

Classroom Text: The Language of Literature, McDougal Littell ISBN 0-618-60139-2

Applebee, Arthur N., et.al. The Language of Literature. Dallas: McDougal Littell, 2006.

REQUIRED Purchase: A Pocket Style Manual ISBN 0-312-40684-3 (Buy used on Amazon.com)

Additional texts to be used; a copy of each will be available in the classroom:

The Bedford Reader 8th edition ed. Kennedy, Kennedy, Aaron ISBN 0-312-39939-1

50 Essays: a portable anthology ed. Samuel Cohen ISBN 0–312–41205–3

Crafting Expository Argument by Michael Degen ISBN: 0966512588

Prospero’s Magic by Michael Degan

Writing with Style 2nd Edition by John Trimbel ISBN: 0130257133

On Writing: a memoir of the craft Stephen King ISBN: 0684853523

ETS Criterion fee required.

Additional texts:

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain); The Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne); Teaching a Stone to Talk and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Dillard); In Our Time (Hemingway); The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger); The Glass Menagerie (Williams); Macbeth (Shakespeare); The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald); In Cold Blood (Capote); Oranges and The McPhee Reader (McPhee); All the Pretty Horses (McCarthy); The Yellow Wallpaper (Gilman); Pentimento (Hellman); Arctic Dreams (Lopez); Inventing the Truth (Zinsser, ed.); Anthem (Rand); others.

Films:

Macbeth, The Glass Menagerie, In Cold Blood, others as appropriate.

Essays by:

Joan Didion, Annie Dillard, Richard Selzer, Gore Vidal, Zora Neale Hurston, S.I. Hayakawa, Ron Kovic, George Orwell, Nancy Mairs, E. B. White, John McPhee, Maxine Hong Kingston, Gay Talese, N. Scott, Momaday, Donald Murray, Barry Lopez, Anna Quindlen, Tom Wolfe, Ellen Goodman, Lewis Thomas, Virginia Woolf, Jonathan Swift, Donald Hall, Malcolm X, James Boswell, Frederick Douglass, William Styron, Richard Rodriguez, Edmund Wilson, Oscar Wilde, Roger Angell, Elizabeth Drew, Sir Thomas More, Vera Brittain, Jack London, Margaret Freyer, Mike Barnicle, others.

Full text handouts on short stories, essays, speeches, letters, and poems will be provided or the URL (Web address) from which copies may be downloaded.

Similarly, it is recommended that students purchase copies of paperback books to highlight and make margin notes in them. If a book is furnished to a student for his or her use, the student is responsible for returning the book at the designated time in the same condition in which it was furnished to him or her.

Monday’s –Tentative Schedule - AP Day. As stated in the course objectives, this is a preparation course for the AP test, therefore we will spend nearly every Monday preparing for that examination. At every possible instance, the content will be taken from the literary period currently addressing. Please be present and prepared to focus on an aspect of the AP test.

Plagiarism

Plagiarism, the use of another's IDEAS or WORDS without properly crediting the source is unethical, academically dishonest, and illegal. In many colleges, plagiarism can result in a student being expelled from school.Each student should be certain that he or she understands exactly what constitutes plagiarism. It will not be tolerated in this class and will result in an automatic zero (0) on the applicable assignment.

In addition to a "zero tolerance" policy on plagiarism, the following policies will also prevail in this class:

  • Students are expected to do their own work. Any evidence of copied work or cheating in any way will result in a grade of zero (0) on the assignment,test or quiz for all parties involved.
  • It is impossible for the teacher to know the subject of a conversation which occurs during a quiz or test;therefore, any talking during a quiz ortest, whether related to subject matter or not, will result in a grade of zero (0) for all parties involved.

Grading Calculations

The final grade is determined on a point system. Your class average at any given time is determined by the points earned divided by points available. Point values are determined primarily by degree of difficulty, and level of complexity and importance to the unit/course objectives.

Grades may initially be lower than those which students have been accustomed. It is important to remember that advanced placement grades are weighted and that only the semester average is reported on a student's transcript. Student grades are based upon essays, presentations, tests, participation and productivity. Each assignment should demonstrate a student's grasp of the concepts and content discussed. All assignments are returned in a timely manner. Not every assignment is graded. It is to the student's benefit, however, to do each and every assignment. Keeping up with the assignments will help improve presentation and participation grades and keep test scores high as well. Thus, it is expected that students will complete and realize the importance of doing all assignments (including homework) as an aid to independent study.

All assignments are due on the assigned date. Late assignments (except those due to excused absences) will be downgraded one letter grade every day late (Saturday and Sunday = 2 days). Virtually all homework assignments are announced in advance and/or posted online. Thus, late assignments due to excused absences are due on the next class meeting date or will be downgraded one letter grade every day late. Exception: Major assignments that are announced well in advance are due on the assigned date and will receive a zero if turned in late. Students will be advised in advance of any project for which late work is unacceptable. Late work due to computer/technology failure is unacceptable.