AP ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND COMPOSITION

Advanced Placement English Language and Composition is a college-level course in which students 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 from the 16th to the 21st Centuries.  Featured writers include James Baldwin, Annie Dillard, Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, Aldous Huxley, John F. Kennedy, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, Upton Sinclair, and Malcolm X.  Throughout the course, students will confer with their teacher and peers about their writing through the process of editing and revision, and will vigorously prepare for the AP English Language and Composition Exam.  Satisfactory performance on the exam may grant students advanced placement, college credit, or both. *In preparation for college study, the course reading and writing activities 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.  The critical skills that students acquire through close and continued analysis of a wide variety of nonfiction texts serve them in their own reading and writing throughout high school, college and into their future careers.  Whether their interests lie in the arts and sciences, in engineering, medicine and health care, the humanities, or business and computing, the ability to read and write effectively are essential tools in the modern world.