The AP Exam

1. The AP Exam What it Is and How to Pass It

2. Part One: Multiple Choice • Counts as 45% of your overall score • 55 items in one hour • Difficult and demanding

3. What do you have to know? • Multiple Choice tests understanding of • Organization of a text • Use of devices of literature • Explication of a line or lines • Implication of word choice or image • Author’s attitude (tone) • Relationship of different words in a text

4. Helpful Hints for M.C. • Answer only questions you can address and attempt to cover all the questions by skipping ones that are too difficult. You lose a quarter of a point for every wrong answer. • Passages are often organized to alternate in difficulty, so it is best to have looked at every question.

5. What does it take to pass? Approximately 55% correct!

6. Literature on the Text • Expect to see novels, short stories, plays, poetry • Expect literature from a wide variety of historical periods with a focus on the devices of literature, narration, and dramatization

7. Essays • Three essays in two hours (40 minutes each) • What are readers looking for? • Organization • Fluency • Proof from text • Deductions • Analysis

8. Question 1: Poetry • Often tied to progression of the speaker’s emotion or some change in perception and how this change is made known to the reader by images, diction, allusion OR • A poem’s particular use of a device such as metaphor, imagery, or diction and how this device helps create the poem’s meaning.

9. Sample poetry prompt • Read the following poem carefully. Then write a well-organized essay in which you explain how formal elements such as structure, syntax, diction, and imagery reveal the speaker’s response to the death of a toad.

10. Sample poetry prompt • Read carefully the following poem by the colonial American poet, Anne Bradstreet. Then write a well-organized essay in which you discuss how the poem’s controlling metaphor expresses the complex attitude of the speaker.

11. Question 2: Prose passage (1) Tone question – frequently a passage drawn from a novel or play; students must discover speaker’s attitude. Students demonstrate how a passage’s diction, images, and sentence structure, e.g., help to reveal tone.

12. Question 2: Prose passage (2) Devices of narrative: typically a short story or excerpt that features sharp use of several devices like point of view, characterization, imagery, conflict, etc. which help to show the author or speaker’s attitude or reveal a theme of the work.

13. Sample question 2 prompt • In the following passage from Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Crossing (1994), the narrator describes a dramatic experience. Read the passage carefully. Then, in a well-organized essay, show how McCarthy’s techniques convey the impact of the experience on the main character.

14. Sample question 2 prompt • In the following excerpts from an essay, Lytton Strachey presents his conception of Florence Nightingale. In a well-organized essay, define Strachey’s view and analyze how he conveys it. Consider such elements as diction, imagery, syntax, and tone.

15. Sample question 2 prompt • Write a well-organized essay in which you analyze the style and tone of the passage below, explaining how they help to express the author’s attitudes.

16. Question 3: Open Question • Application of a general notion to a specific text • Character’s regret for the past • Settings that are contrasting • Parallel events that make a point of theme

17. Sample Question 3 Prompt • 1993: "The true test of comedy is that it shall awaken thoughtful laughter." (George Meredith) Choose a novel, play, or long poem in which a scene of character awakens "thoughtful laughter" in the reader. Write an essay in which you show why this laughter is "thoughtful" and how it contributes to the meaning of the work.

18. Sample Question 3 Prompt • 1995: Writers often highlight the values of a culture or a society by using characters who are alienated from that culture or society because of gender, race, class, or creed. Choose a play or a novel in which such a character plays a significant role and show how that character's alienation reveals the surrounding society's assumptions and moral values.

19. Sample Question 3 Prompt • 1985: A critic has said that one important measure of a superior work of literature is its ability to produce in the reader a healthy confusion of pleasure and disquietude. Select a literary work that produces this "healthy confusion." Write an essay in which you explain the sources of the "pleasure and disquietude" experienced by the readers of the work.

20. Skills Need for AP Lit. Exam • Ability to read a passage closely and to understand its content as well as the function of point of view, tone, syntax, diction, and specific detail in relation to the author’s purpose. (How does the author’s style of writing support the author’s purpose for writing?)

21. Skills Need for AP Lit. Exam • The willingness and the courage to trust his/her own ideas and his/her ability to defend these ideas. • The ability to put ideas into a written format that focuses on a particular argument supported by textual evidence.

22. AP Essays: Helpful Hints • Don’t present yourself as an immature writer. • Handwriting issues • Brief, scant responses are the worst error you can make as the AP reader is left with no way to evaluate your ability.

23. AP Essays: Helpful Hints (2) • Avoid those serious errors which will mark you as an unprepared writer. • Comma splices • Repeated occurrences of sentence fragments • Spelling errors (a few are acceptable) • Errors of usage (ex. Affect/effect)

24. AP Essays: Helpful Hints (3) • Write sentences that are smooth, flowing, clear, sensible; avoid short, choppy sentences. • Proofread to ensure that you have not omitted words. • Proofread to make sure wording is not so confused, awkward, or ineffective that the reader cannot figure out what you are saying.

25. AP Essays: Helpful Hints (4) • Sentences which are sharp, precise, and clear but which at the same time show complexity characterize the best writing. • A fluent, clear style is a primary characteristic of higher-level writing. • Use sentence variety to develop a more sophisticated style.

26. AP Essays: Helpful Hints (5) • ORGANIZATION & CONTENT: the most important issues! • Respond EXACTLY to the question asked (AP = answer prompt); your answer is in the question; accept that guidance. Interpret and illustrate the question.

27. AP Essays: Helpful Hints (5) • Keep your focus clear throughout the essay. Make sure thoughts are in logical sequence. • Use specific details both to offer commentary and interpretation and to support and illustrate your points. • Explain through examples and comments on the details of the text.

28. AP Essays: Helpful Hints (6) • Plan to spend about five minutes brainstorming and structuring your response, then write from your outline. Write with the end in mind!!! • Once you begin writing, try to maintain a continuous, logical, and focused flow. You may have new ideas as you go, but try to connect continually where you began, where you are, and where you are going.

29. The “9” Format • Use the handout given as a guide. • Internalize the process!

30. What NOT to do: • Do not parrot the prompt word for word. • Do not take a circuitous route with generalizations. • Do not simply “point out” literary devices. • Do not digress. • Do not put in a “canned” quotation if it does not fit.

31. Last but not least… Write to express, not to impress!