AP Language Syllabus
Becky Talk
Cushing H.S. Cushing, TX
The AP English Language and Composition course is designed to give students multiple opportunities to work with the rhetorical situation, examining the authors’ purposes as well as the audiences and the subjects in texts. Students write in a variety of modes for a variety of audiences, developing a sense of personal style and an ability to analyze and articulate how the resources of language operate in any given text. Because our students live in a highly visual world, we also study the rhetoric of visual media such as photographs, films, advertisements, comic strips, charts and graphs, and music videos. [C6] In concert with the College Board’s AP English Course Description, our course teaches “students to read primary and secondary sources carefully, to synthesize material from these texts in their own compositions, and to cite sources using conventions recommended by professional organizations such as the Modern Language Association (MLA).”
Texts used:
Prose Pieces: Essays and Stories—Sixteen Modern Writers. Hoy, Pat. C II, Robert Diyanni, editors.
50 Essays: A Portable Anthology, 2nd ed. Cohen, Samuel, editor.
The Riverside Reader. Trimmer, Joseph and Maxine Hairston.
The Best American Essays of the Century. Oates, Joyce Carol and Robert Atwan, editors.
Sentence Composing for College. Killgallon, Don.
Prose Style: A Contemporary Guide. Miles, Robert, Marc Bertonasco, and William Karns.
Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student. Corbett, Edward P., and Robert J. Connors.
Picturing Texts. Faigley, Lester, Diane George, Anna Palchik, and Cynthia Selfe.
Summer Reading:
To begin familiarizing students with nonfiction, all summer they will read articles from The New York Times which I post online. They write a precis of the article, a description of the tone of the article, and rhetorical devices the author uses. The short professional pieces in The New York Times allow students to analyze the types of arguments, claims, and appeals writers use, to identify rhetorical devices, and to examine the connections between the writers and their audience, specifically in the use of tone and voice. [C5] They email their work to me. [C1]
Working with short, manageable pieces is critical for this work preparatory to the beginning of the class. Students read and analyze one article per week during the summer. The hope is that students will begin to internalize this information as they write their own essays.
Reading in the Course:
Reading in this course and writing activities should help students learn to read for details, for patterns of language, making them more alert to an author’s purpose, the needs of an audience, the demands of the subject, and the resources of language the writer uses to develop meaning. By early May of the school year, students will have nearly completed a course in close reading and purposeful, even sophisticated, writing. The critical skills that students learn to appreciate through close and continued analysis of a wide variety of nonfiction texts can serve them in their own writing as they grow increasingly aware of these skills and their uses. During the course, a wide variety of texts (prose, drama, image-based) and writing tasks provide the focus for an in-depth study of language, rhetoric, and argument.
Writing in the Course:
To teach a mature and sophisticated writing style, students will do imitation exercises as they study the text Prose Style: A Contemporary Guide by Robert Miles, Marc Bertonasco, and William Karns. I discovered this text in a graduate writing course, and it changed the way I write. I have seen its transformative power on my students’ prose from year to year. Here is a list of the chapters we will study all year long, along with pertinent exercises practicing particular skills: [C3, C9]
· Levels of Style
· Connotations
· Clarity
· Specificity
· Conciseness
· Coordination
· Subordination
· Precision
· Transitions
· The Sound of the Sentence
· Parallelism
· Sentence Variety
· Figures of Speech
· Slanting
· The Writer’s Voice
We also use Sentence Composing for College by Don Killgallon to facilitate students’ awareness of the many ways they can use subordination and coordination to develop a more mature, even sophisticated writing style. [C9]
Throughout the year, students will writer in several forms (expository, persuasive, personal, analytical) about a variety of subjects. [C1] Student writing will take different forms, depending on the needs of the class and the particular works being studied. Students will complete all the following forms of writing throughout the year: quick-writes, journal entries, writing just one body paragraph of an essay or just the introduction addressing the demands of the prompt, practicing writing thesis statements, rewriting body paragraphs, etc. [C3] Some essays are written in class in response to released free response questions. These essays are always assessed using the appropriate scoring guide. We always spend class time analyzing each students’ score according to the scoring guide and looking at released student samples. Some essays are written out of class and taken through the writing process.
Students will write two researched argument papers during the course of the year. They will do frequent timed writing activities with released free response prompts and complete several out-of-class essays which they take through several drafts.
First Six Weeks: Introduction to The Basics of Rhetoric: Rhetorical Analysis, Writing Persuasively, and Synthesis
At the beginning of the school year, we review the concept of rhetoric, which is a new one to students who up to this point at Cushing have read mostly only imaginative literature. I begin with a PowerPoint on the three appeals and introduce ads for students to analyze, looking at the way the ads appeal mostly to emotion and noticing that the ethical appeal is lacking because the purpose of the ads is to make money. [C6] In a second PowerPoint, we explore the difference between rhetorical analysis and persuasive writing. We analyze the way the appeals are used and the way the authors use rhetorical devices to persuade their listeners/readers in excerpts from three speeches: George Bush’s speech to both houses of Congress nine days after the events of 9-11, Maya Angelou speaking at the funeral of Coretta Scott King, and a Al Gore’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize. We then analyze two articles, looking at one rhetorical device at a time and focusing on writing commentary that links that device to the writer’s purpose. Using a template, students then write a rhetorical analysis over a third article. After that essay, students write a persuasive essay according to a template. Students are exposed to the rudiments of the whole course: analysis of nonfiction prose and writing rhetorical analysis and writing persuasively.
Before students write “cold”essays on released exam questions and to further prepare them for all the writing they will do this year, I take the 2008 exam rhetorical analysis question (John M. Barry, scientific research) and work through a lesson I have written. The lesson teaches students how to analyze the prompt, how to analyze the passage paragraph by paragraph, and how to write the thesis statement and body paragraphs. We work particularly with writing the body paragraphs with assertions, textual evidence, and commentary/analysis. After I work with each student individually in writing a body paragraph for the prompt, they spend a class period writing the essay. After the Barry prompt, we then work through a lesson on the “corporate sponsorship” persuasive prompt. We go step-by-step through the process, culminating in the students writing the essay in a timed setting. We then look at the “penny” synthesis question and analyze each of the sources, practicing evaluation of those sources, culminating in students writing the essay in a timed setting. For each essay, I discuss in detail with students the strengths and weaknesses of their papers. Therefore, in the first few weeks of school, I teach students step by step how to write a rhetorical analysis essay, a persuasive essay, and a synthesis essay. [C1, C4]
To help students read and analyze difficult prose and to prepare for the multiple choice section of the Language exam, students will complete a lesson approximately every two weeks. They will be given a passage from the released exams and answer guided questions over that passage for homework. The next day they will answer the multiple choice questions in a timed setting. Here are the passages I will use and for which I have written guided close reading questions:
Excerpt from “The Poetry of Pope,” Thomas De Quincey, 1848
John Stuart Mill passage
Joyce Carroll Oates passage
Walter Isaacson passage
W.E.B. DuBois passage
Excerpt from My Garden, Abigail Dodge, 1862
Excerpt from The Decline of Grammar, Geoffrey Nunberg, 1983
Annie Dillard from Holy the Firm
de Tocqueville passage
Ralph Ellison passage
Samuel Johnson passage
M. Scott Momaday passage
Shirley Abbott passage
Virginia Woolf passage
Zora Neale Hurston passage
C. Woodham Smith passage
Barbara Tuchman passage
William Hazlitt passage
John Dryden passage
Mark Twain passage
Second Six Weeks: Personal Identity Unit
To help students prepare for the research aspect of this unit, I introduce them to visual texts through the chapter “Picturing Argument” in Picturing Texts.
Students read essays/speeches all dealing with some aspect of one’s personal identity and complete multiple choice passages/answer multiple choice questions dealing with this issue. Classroom discussion and quick writes center on tone, purpose, structure, rhetorical strategies, point of view. Students will research six images and visual representations dealing with personal identity. [C6] They will present their findings in a PowerPoint presentation to the class. I will then put together a synthesis question employing some of the works we studied and some of the students’ visual representations. It will be up to the students to choose the written texts and image-based texts they will use in their essays, which will be at least 1000 words. During this six weeks, students will write at least three in-class essays from released free response questions and work through at least three multiple choice passages.
As students prepare to write this synthesis essay, they prepare for two student/teacher writing conferences, conducted one-on-one. In the first conference, students identify both the written texts they will use in their paper and the image-based texts. They will discuss the commonalities in the texts chosen and their purpose for writing the essay. They will offer a thesis statement. Students continue to receive support and collect feedback during the writing process from me as well as their peers. [C2] In the second conference, we work together to make sure that the students is accurately synthesizing the sources and incorporating their own argument in with the sources. I want students to learn to depend not only on the sources but on their own observations, experiences, and reading as well so that the synthesis essay is a seamless whole. In this second conference I also make sure that the student is citing sources correctly, according to MLA style. In their final essays, students are expected to exercise and sharpen the research and rhetorical skills that ultimately will support and illuminate their own arguments. Students are directed to carefully evaluate, employ, and properly cite primary and secondary sources, again using MLA documentation. [C8]
Essay prompt: All of the essays we have read and studied deal with some aspect of one’s personal identity, whether that identity be rooted in ethnicity, gender, race, or physical limitations. Select at least four essays and three visual representations from those the class has produced. Develop a thesis in which you delve into a commonality among them all. Using MLA documentation, make sure you refer to all seven texts. You should strive for a balance of textual references and your own experiences and observations. Your essay should be at least 1000 words.
Essays/Speeches studied: [C5]
“The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me,” Sherman Alexie
“Learning to Read and Write,” Frederick Douglass paired with passage from The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano
“Notes of a Native Son,” James Baldwin
“Notes of a Native Speaker,” Eric Liu
“Two Ways to Belong in America,”Bharati Mukherjee
“Ain’t I a Woman?” Sojourner Truth
“There is No Unmarked Woman,” Deborah Tannen
“On Being a Cripple,” Nancy Mairs
“Just Walk on by: Black Men and Public Space,” Brent Staples, paired with the film Goodbye Solo (2008)
“Way to Rainy Mountain,” M. Scott Momaday
Released multiple choice passages from AP Language exam:
M. Scott Momaday passage
W.E.B. DuBois passage
Joyce Carroll Oates passage
Virginia Woolf, from “Professions for Women”
Third Six Weeks: The Researched Argument Essay--Researching an Author’s Beginnings
In preparation for the research-based causal argument, students will review research skills, including identification and evaluation of primary and secondary sources; organization and integration of source materials; and documentation and organization of a researched argument. [C7, C8] The major project of the second semester is a research-based causal argument examining the contextual influences (historical, cultural, environmental, etc.) on a selected twentieth century essay and the impact and effects of those influences on his or her style, purpose, and intent in at least one representative essay. The causal argument is different from a traditional research paper because the student must consider and present alternative causes and effects in direct opposition to his or her position. Students are required to synthesize at least five sources into their project. [C7].
This unit begins with an overview of the essay as genre, noting its early beginning as a Renaissance invention. As the weeks progress, students study the characteristics of approximately fifteen essays. Each student selects a twentieth century essay from the list and is responsible for creating a PowerPoint presentation on the day assigned to discussion of that particular writer’s work. The culmination of the study is the research-based causal argument. Students will read the following essays in this unit. They will select one of the authors to research.
From Prose Pieces:
“A Hanging,” George Orwell
“Weasel,” Annie Dillard
“The Grave,” Katherine Anne Porter
“Imelda,” Richard Selzer
“Adolf,” D.H. Lawrence
“Everyday Use,” Alice Walker
“Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: Seeing,” Annie Dillard
“The Geese,” E.B. White
“Self-Respect,” Joan Didion
From 50 Essays: A Portable Anthology, 2nd ed. Samuel Cohen:
“Death of a Moth,” Annie Dillard paired with “The Death of the Moth,” Virginia Woolf
“Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Shooting an Elephant,” George Orwell
“Once More to the Lake,” E.B. White
Fourth Six Weeks: The Crucible, Arthur Miller and the Researched Argument: Rural America