Improving my AP Vocabulary Journal
AP students need a wide vocabulary, yet acquiring this vocabulary is often fraught with tedious tests and words one would never use or remember. So what to do? Your task this year is to create a personal dictionary. Periodically, I will ask to see your dictionary, and I expect the words to flow into your essays. Consider the many styles, images, language, places, and details you must analyze. To start you on this journey, here are a few you may want to consider for describing style and syntax:
plain, spare, austere, unadorned
ornate, elaborate, flowery
jumbled, chaotic, obfuscating
erudite, esoteric
journalistic, terse, laconic
harsh, grating
mellifluous, musical, lilting, lyrical
whimsical
elegant
staccato, abrupt
solid, thudding
sprawling, disorganized
dry
deceptively simple
I would like you to illustrate how you would use the word. Note the following passage from Out Stealing Horses:
“And each time I saw my father lying with half-closed eyes glancing at her as she walked towards us, and I did too, I could not stop myself, and because we did, Jon’s father did as well, in a different way then I had seen him do before, and maybe that was no so strange after all. But I do not think that what we saw was the same thing, for what he saw made him embarrassed and apparently surprised. What I saw made me want to fell the highest spruce and watch it tip over and fall with a rush and a crash that echoed through the valley and trim it myself in record time and strip it clean myself without stopping even though that was the hardest thing to do and drag it to the river bank with my bare hands and my own back with neither horse nor man to help me and heave it into the water with the strength I suddenly knew I had, and the splash and the spray would rise as high as a house in Oslo.”
Write some sentences discussing the syntax, tone, and style using fresh vocabulary, highlighting or identifying the new words.
There are two ways to eat this elephant:1)find a passage, and then find words to support your ideas or 2), find words and match them to a passage/ poem/play.
Please keep the vocabulary journal separate from other work, so you can turn it in independently. Yes, it needs to be typed.