You've made it! Tomorrow is the big day! Below is the document we put together in class with all of the major stuff we've read and discussed this year.
You have worked so hard this year to improve your writing, and it’s showing! You’ve made great improvements in your writing and your reasoning skills. Keep it up. I’m so proud of you and how hard you’ve worked to get better. Here are some things to keep in mind tomorrow.
You are wonderful and I'm already so proud of you. You're going to be awesome tomorrow. I just know it. :)
You have worked so hard this year to improve your writing, and it’s showing! You’ve made great improvements in your writing and your reasoning skills. Keep it up. I’m so proud of you and how hard you’ve worked to get better. Here are some things to keep in mind tomorrow.
- MAKE YOUR POSITION CLEAR. In the synthesis and argumentative essays, you need to make sure that you include a strong thesis statement that clearly states what your argument is. Don't be wishy-washy. In the rhetorical analysis essay, you need to make sure that you identify the author's purpose/position in the first paragraph.
- Rhetorical analysis = PASTA. PASTA = Purpose, Audience, Subject, Tone, Author's Bias.
- Time Management. You have 40 minutes for each of these essays (not including the 15 minutes that they give you to read the passages and questions). It’s imperative that you manage your time well if you’re going to be successful on these essays. BRING A WATCH. Go buy one or borrow one from your grandpa if you need to . There will be a clock in the room, but you should have the time right there in front of you. It’s up to you which essay you complete first. If I were you, I’d save the one that you deem to be the most difficult for last. With this strategy, you’ll knock the others out of the park and then if the last one (that wouldn’t have been your strongest anyway) is lacking a little, it’ll be offset by the awesome scores you’ll receive on the first two. The last thing I’m going to say about time management—something you’re probably really tired of hearing me say—is that YOU NEED TO PLAN. Yes, you think it’s a waste of time (do you really still think that?), but I assure you that it’s not. Don’t get so nervous during the test that you forget to plan and rush through it. A thorough and organized plan will help to guide you through the essay, and I promise you that it’ll make you write better papers. (For the rhetorical analysis papers, the plan is PASTA, for the synthesis and argumentative essays you can plan however you like.)
- Length. Your essay should be about 400 words (ish). Earlier this year you went through and counted the words on a paper to get an estimate for how many pages 400 words is with your handwriting. For most people, it’s around two pages (not front and back). While the graders are not grading you on length necessarily, an essay that is significantly shorter than 400 words will be thought of as underdeveloped.
- Be specific. Be as specific as possible. Sometimes the thing that keeps your essays from being a point (or even two) higher is a lack of specificity. So be specific. Put in examples from life or history or literature or the news or anything you know. Explain those examples and why they’re applicable to the topic or your thesis.
- Bigger ideas. Connect the ideas in your essay to larger, more important, more universal ideas. So that Florence Kelly essay about child labor isn’t really just about child labor--in fact, it was actually about women’s suffrage. And even women’s suffrage is about something greater: equality and participation in our democracy. Here’s another example. If you’re writing about abolishing the penny, yes, there are practical reasons to do so. But the greater argument, perhaps, might be about how people cling to the past even though it’s no longer practical or reasonable to do so. You could discuss here how people are reluctant to embrace change even when it’s advantageous to do so. And yadda yadda. You get the idea. The place to put in these big transcendent ideas is the conclusion paragraph. If you can pull it off, it’ll help your essay scores.
- Personal voice. No “I think”s! Most of you have a really great sense of personal voice, and your writing is easy to understand without being too chummy or casual. What you’ll need to do on the actual AP exam is to be more assertive, more authoritative. Sometimes your chillaxedness (um, yes, that’s a word!) can come across as not caring as much as you need to care. So be careful there. Get rid of all of the “I feel”s and “I believe”s and state your ideas clearly and directly.
- Write at the top of your voice. Remember that the readers of these essays are literally reading thousands of these papers. THOUSANDS. So to make yours stand out and to receive a higher score, you need to come up with your ideas and be powerful in the way that you present them. Being powerful doesn’t mean you have to be aggressive or a big jerk, but that you show a confidence in your ideas and your abilities. Come up with your ideas, support those ideas, and be a total world dominator when you’re writing your papers. It’ll show through and, when executed effectively, earn you higher scores on those essays.
- Don’t sacrifice meaning because you’re trying to make it sound smart. You definitely want to be bringing your more formal language to these essays. This isn’t a text or an email or a conversation with friends. But if you are so focused on trying to sound smart that you lose sight of your actual purpose in writing the essay, then it’ll hurt your score. Yes, use a big word here and there. Yes, try to sound intelligent. But sounding intelligent is less important than being intelligent. To be intelligent on your papers, generate solid ideas and back those ideas up with solid evidence (either from the text or from life or history or literature or whatever). Be intelligent first. Sound intelligent second.
- MULTIPLE CHOICE. What will likely determine how high a score you receive on the exam (and, subsequently, how many college credits you’ll receive) is your performance on the multiple choice. So, on the multiple choice section, keep these things in mind:
- Read the passages first. Circle things, underline things. Go ahead and number the paragraphs, too.
- Use process of elimination. You can usually get rid of 2-3 answer choices relatively easily, which of course then improves your chances of getting the question correct.
- If you don’t know a term or vocabulary word in an answer choice, leave that answer choice in there as a possibility. Remember that the fact that you don’t know the word makes it neither correct nor incorrect.
- STAY AWAKE. If you go to sleep during this test, Mrs. Herrington will tell me. You’ll get a zero on the test grade you’re getting just for staying awake during the exam, and I will not allow you to complete any makeup work. STAY AWAKE! Go to bed early the night before, eat a good breakfast, do whatever it is that you need to do to be alert during the test. It’s important.
You are wonderful and I'm already so proud of you. You're going to be awesome tomorrow. I just know it. :)
crap_we’ve_talked_about_2016.pptx |