You have been writing your entire life. After learning the
alphabet, you learned to write words, sentences, then paragraphs, and finally
essays. Initially, you were restating the plot of the Clifford the Big Red Dog or
the life cycle of caterpillars in your writing. But no more! Now that you are
in high school, you have to create, express and defend new and original
arguments from your point of view, not the authors’.
In AP Lang, you write your argument on the prompt, but you include your own support, analysis and evidence. You will be articulating your own ideas in your writing and then proving them with support from your evidence and analysis. Essentially, the teachers want you to write like college students; this technically is what an AP class is - a college level class.
By second quarter, there are four basic types of essays you
should be able to compose: argumentative, synthesis, rhetorical analysis, and
compare/contrast. In argumentative essays, you pick an argument and defend or
justify it. With synthesis, you are given a prompt to answer and documents with
which you have to incorporate into your essay. Rhetorical analysis is the explanation
of the author’s argument through analyzing their rhetoric. And compare and
contrast is the examining the similarities and differences between two subjects.
When you write, be efficient and succinct. A huge problem for me in my writing was that my ideas would be all over my essay and although they were good, they didn’t make a coherent argument that supported my thesis. That is why it is important to write an outline before every essay. Believe me when I say that you will not only finish more quickly, but your essay will be straightforward and easy to follow. Also when writing, use smart diction. This demonstrates your knowledge of vocabulary. Just make sure you don’t use words that you don’t know or can’t use properly. If you don’t like books, rest assured - there are many online dictionaries just waiting for you to use them.
Now the grading scale for the essays in an AP class is
different from non-AP classes in that they are graded on a scale from 1-9, with
9 being the highest grade. My tip for achieving that highly coveted “9” is to
carefully structure your argument to make it most effective. Like everything
else, writing takes practice and in order to improve and ultimately excel as a
writer, you must work at it.
