AP English 4

Dr. Murphy

Pre-Writing the Essay Portion

AP Exams are largely about managing the clock. It is difficult to decide how much time to spend on the task of prewriting, for example, which is a vital skill in writing competent, credible, and creative AP Exam essays. The first task in prewriting is to identify exactly what the question is asking; then one can move on to imagining and organizing theresponse strategies and tactics that constitute winning essays. The following prompts are taken from Free Response sections of previously administered AP Exams.

Review: For each of the following prompts, write a “prewriting treatment.” While prewriting approaches are largely personalized, be sure to include the following:

  1. A restatement of the question: What, exactly, is the question asking? What skills as a student of English is the question designed to expose? What will the AP readers be looking for?
  2. Texts: What are your options (i.e. which texts can serve as legitimate subjects for you given the parameters of the question)? Usually (for questions 1 and 2), you’ll have a specific text/passage from which to work; but, you can, if you deem it judicious, refer to another text to build a better answer. For question 3, you have more latitude. In all cases, use your imagination here; you have more options than you might think. SELECT ONE.
  3. Elements of Literature: Upon which elements of literature is the question focused? What other elements will you employ? Too many? Too few?
  4. Content/Interpretation: In regards to meaning, what is each question looking for? What will be the central message of your interpretation? What will your thesis statement be? How will you convey your thesis to your reader? TPCASTT (or other organizing strategies) work well here.
  5. Other: Feel free to include anything else you deem useful within the constraints of time.

The Following Questions are all # 3’s: The Free Response Question. For samples of questions 1 and 2, link to AP Central.

1. In questioning the value of literary realism, Flannery O'Connor has written, “I am interested in making a good case for distortion because I am coming to believe that it is the only way to make people see.” Write an essay in which you “make a good case for distortion,” as distinct from literary realism. Base your essay on a work of literary merit that you know well. Analyze how important elements of the work you choose are “distorted” and explain how these distortions contribute to the effectiveness of the work. Avoid plot summary.

2. In great literature, no scene of violence exists for its own sake. Choose a work of literary merit that confronts the reader or audience with a scene or scenes of violence. In a well-organized essay, explain how the scene or scenes contribute to the meaning of the complete work. Avoid plot summary.

3. In his essay “Walking,” Henry David Thoreau offers the following assessment of literature:

In literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is but another name for tameness. It is the uncivilized free and wild thinking in Hamlet and The Iliad, in all scriptures and mythologies, not learned in schools, that delights us.

From the works that you have studied in school, choose a novel, play, or epic poem that you may initially have thought was conventional and tame but that you now value for its “uncivilized free and wild thinking.” Write an essay in which you explain what constitutes its “uncivilized free and wild thinking” and how that thinking is central to the value of the work as a whole. Support your ideas with specific references to the work you choose.