Advanced Placement English

Language and Composition

Course Description:

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

From me: The main difference between this course and your 11th grade course is that Language and Composition is not limited to literary analysis and the reading of fiction. While you will certainly use your skills in that area, you will be examining texts that are largely non-fiction. As the course title suggests, your focus will be on language—the author’s use, manipulation, and structuring of language. You will be asked to consider how the rhetorical choices of the writer affect (and are affected by) his audience, topic, and purpose. As in AP Literature, you will be reading, writing, and talking your way through these things in order to master them.

Philosophy:

We all know that there is a test at the end of the year. It is important for you to realize that this class is not designed to prepare you for that test. It is designed to help you further appreciate the beauty of the written word and the amazing possibilities of the English language. It is designed to do that through careful reading and thoughtful writing. It is designed to give you a breadth of experience in both instruction and application that will take you beyond any test. It will further prepare you for the reading, writing and thought necessary to begin full participation in the human race!—well, okay, it looks funny in print, but the course goes beyond the test. Apply yourself and you will improve as a writer, reader, and thinker—the test will take care of itself.

Nuts and Bolts:

AP Language and Composition is both a reading and writing course. Success assumes that entering students understand and use standard English grammar. The concentration on language and rhetoric in this course should help students become more mature readers and writers. Maturity requires refined appreciation when reading and appropriate application when writing. Nurturing that maturity requires that the student understand, identify and apply:

· a wide range vocabulary that considers denotation and connotation;

· a variety of sentence structures, including appropriate use of subordination and coordination;

· logical organization, enhanced by specific techniques to increase coherence, such as repetition, transitions, and emphasis;

· diction, syntax, and a balance of detail, etc. appropriate to the writer’s purpose;

· tone and voice as controlling elements in writing;

· the relationship among writer, reader, and subject; and

· the elements of argument as a mode.

Reading for the first quarter will include but not be limited to the following:

· A Clockwork Orange

· The Joy Luck Club

· The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

· Chapter selections from On Writing Well by William Zinsser

· Examination of specific concerns in student writing addressed in Elements of Style

· The New Yorker Magazine

· Letters and essays by the following writers:

Orwell, Twain, Lady Mary Montague, Dickens, Lord Chesterfield, Kafka, Keats, DH Lawrence, Bacon, Walter Isaacson, Darwin, Brad Manning, HL Mencken

· Assorted poetry to illustrate specific language features, e.g. Hardy’s “The Man He

Killed” to define ambivalence and tone, and how specific diction creates these, as connected to Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant.”

Reading for the second quarter will include but not be limited to the following:

· Julius Caesar

· Utopia

· The Prince

· “The Declaration of Independence”

· The Canterbury Tales

· Essays by MLK, Thoreau, Kincaid, Woolf, Dr. Johnson, Douglass, Lincoln, Mencken, Dave Barry, Plato, Swift

At the end of the 1st semester, the midterm examination is a complete, released AP Language & Literature test.

Reading for the third quarter will include but not be limited to the following:

· Walden

· The Prince

· Continued use of On Writing Well and Elements of Style

· Essays and arguments by the following: O’Connor, Harold Bloom, Dillard, Emerson, Poe, Hazlitt, Gould, Didion, Coleridge, Momaday,

· Articles from The New Yorker magazine

· Critical and primary source material for individual research projects

Reading for the fourth quarter will include but not be limited to the following: (Note: The fourth quarter for seniors, who make up the entirety of this class lasts approximately 17-18 days)

· Macbeth

· Slaughterhouse Five

· Additional readings by Didion, EB White, Percy, Momaday, Berry, Orwell

The final examination will be a complete, released AP Language & Literature test.