AP English Language and Composition
This elective course is designed for students who demonstrate a high level of academic achievement and the self discipline necessary to complete assignments independently. The purpose of the course is to prepare students for both the AP Language and Composition and the AP Literature and Composition examinations administered by the College Board in May of each year.
There is an emphasis on a variety of writing tasks and skills that include the planning, writing and revising of sustained essays, including text analyses, reader response to text, comparison and contrast, agreement and disagreement, narration and description.
In order to receive credit for this course, the student must be able to perform the following writing tasks at a minimal level of proficiency:
- Employ a variety of rhetorical structures including fiction and non-fiction text analysis, argumentation and literature based essays.
- Subordinate parts to an effective whole within an essay and create appropriate transitions between them.
- Adopt the conventions of the appropriate discipline or community of discourse when writing for a particular audience.
- Gather information and ideas, discover patterns and develop a rationale.
- Demonstrate stylistic maturity in writing, including choice of language, voice, vocabulary and tone, appropriate to an intellectually sophisticated audience.
- Recognize the conventions of different genres and periods of time, and identify the assumptions authors have made about their audiences.
- Shape language in a variety of rhetorical patterns so that sentence structure, diction and figures of speech serve purpose, mode, and audience.
Ms. Snyder