AP LANGUAGE & COMPOSITION A & B
This course cultivates the reading and writing skills that students need for college success and for intellectually responsible civic engagement. The course guides students in becoming curious, critical and responsive readers of diverse texts, and becoming flexible, reflective writers of texts addressed to diverse audiences for diverse purposes. The reading and writing students do in the course should deepen and expand their understanding of how written language functions rhetorically: to communicate writers’ intentions and elicit readers’ responses in particular situations. The course cultivates the rhetorical understanding and use of written language by directing students’ attention to writer/reader interactions in their reading and writing of various formal and informal genres.
There is heavy writing—weekly papers during the 1st and 2nd marking periods and a 12-15 page research paper in the 2nd semester. The class entails lots of reading of short, academic and nonfiction articles. Tasks include reading, annotating, analyzing and timed writes. There is no better place for a college bound student to be. This is an amazing skill set to have when you enter college regardless of which field you plan to pursue. The three target writing areas are Synthesis, Rhetorical Analysis and Argument.