Course Overview
Students in this introductory college-level course read and carefully analyze a broad
and challenging range of nonfiction prose selections, deepening their awareness
of rhetoric and how language works. Through close reading and frequent writing,
students develop their ability to work with language and text with a greater awareness
of purpose and strategy, while strengthening their own composing abilities.
Course
readings feature expository, analytical, personal, and argumentative texts from a
variety of authors and historical contexts. Students examine and work with essays,
letters, speeches, images, and imaginative literature. Featured authors include
Annie Dillard, Jill Ker Conway, Eudora Welty, E. B. White, Michel de Montaigne,
Truman Capote, Susan Sontag, Mark Twain, Donald Murray, James Joyce, and William
Shakespeare. Students frequently confer about their writing in the Writing Center as
well as in class. Summer reading and writing are required. Students prepare for the AP®
English Language and Composition Exam and may be granted advanced placement,
college credit, or both as a result of satisfactory performance.
Central course textbooks include The Craft of Revision; Easy Writer; Everyday Use:
Rhetoric at Work in Reading and Writing; Everything’s an Argument: With Readings;
Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir; The Norton Sampler: Short Essays
for Composition; One Hundred Great Essays; Picturing Texts; and Subjects/Strategies: A
Writer’s Reader.
Course reading and writing activities should help students gain textual power, making
them more alert to an author’s purpose, the needs of an audience, the demands of the
subject, and the resources of language: syntax, word choice, and tone. By early May
of the school year, students will have nearly completed a course in close reading and
purposeful writing. The critical skills that students learn to appreciate through close
and continued analysis of a wide variety of nonfiction texts can serve them in their
own writing as they grow increasingly aware of these skills and their pertinent uses.
During the course, a wide variety of texts (prose and image based) and writing tasks
provide the focus for an energetic study of language, rhetoric, and argument.
As this is a college-level course, performance expectations are appropriately high, and
the workload is challenging. Students are expected to commit to a minimum of five
hours of course work per week outside of class. Often, this work involves long-term
writing and reading assignments, so effective time management is important. Because
of the demanding curriculum, students must bring to the course sufficient command of
mechanical conventions and an ability to read and discuss prose.
The course is constructed in accordance with the guidelines described in the AP English
Course Description.