You're about to learn how to write an essay. Everything I will tell you is important. I can't stress enough how important these things are. When I tell you to do it, you need to do it, even if it's "extra" or "too much work". I got a 5 in the AP Language exam and essays are a breeze to me because of what I know and do when writing an essay. So when I tell you to do something, you better do it.
My AP Lang teacher made us by our own textbook rather than use the required textbook provided by the school. IT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT BOOK IN MY LIFE. It has everything that I learned about AP Lang and essay writing. You go through the different types of essays and how to analyze and write them. It provides essay examples for you to analyze and prompts for you to practice writing these types of essays. It provides great explanations and recommended reading excerpts of fictional and non-fictional works WITH analysis questions.
I brought the book to college for reference. Everything I'll be telling came straight from this book. It's available on Amazon and I really recommend you buying it for yourself. The book is "Patterns for College Writing: A Rhetorical Reader and Guide, Tenth Edition" by Laurie Kirszber and Stephen R. Mandell. That was my edition but you can choose others. I looked it up on Google and there's a free pdf of a "brief edition" of the textbook, but I still recommend buying your own physical copy.
I love the book so much, I'm even going to reference it in "Broken Glasses" (which is a book I'm writing that you can read *cough*).
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Writing an Outline
You. Need. To. Always. Write. An. Outline.
Remember when I said you need to listen to me even when something is too much? Yeah, it's for this.
I'm not asking you to make several drafts, I'm telling you to make an outline. For the AP Language exam and many other in-class essays, you won't have time to make several drafts but only turn in one final essay. That's why it's important to write an outline.
My AP Lang teacher told us a story that during an in-class essay, one girl took 75% of the time working on her outline until she realized how much time she had left. She ended up getting one of the best scores despite the little time she had left because she had such a great outline. Making an outline is practically your first draft as it's the skeleton of your essay. Your essay is just filling in the gaps to put all the pieces together for the reader.
I'll go over what your outline should consist of in the next section.
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Essay Structure
Here is my general outline of an essay. I'll elaborate on it afterward.
Introduction
- Thesis Statement
- Concluding sentence to transition to the First Body Paragraph
First Body Paragraph
- Introduction sentence with the main idea
- Evidence, Comment, Comment
- Concluding sentence with a transition to the next Second Body Paragraph
Second Body Paragraph
- Introduction sentence with the main idea
- Evidence, Comment, Comment
- Concluding sentence with a transition to the next Third Body Paragraph
Third Body Paragraph
- Introduction sentence with the main idea
- Evidence, Comment, Comment
- Concluding sentence with a transition to the Conclusion
Conclusion
- Restate Thesis Statement
It's very important for you to create the outline for this essay structure to work. For my example essay, I'll be outlining an essay about why Black Lives Matter #BLM. Yes, I made an essay outline on the spot for you guys. If I were to be given a prompt about whether the Black Lives Matter movement is important, I would make the following outline (During an hour-long time essay it should take you 5-10 minutes to make an outline, but you can push it to 15-20 minutes).
Introduction
- Thesis Statement: The Black Lives Matter movement is an important cause to support because of the centuries of injustice the black community has faced, the establishment of the police system created against the black community, and the current events related to the movement.
- Concluding/Transition sentence: First, we need to look at the history that the black community has faced that makes the BLM movement relevant.
Body Paragraph: History
- Introduction: The black community has faced centuries of oppression.
- Scramble for Africa/ The Rape of Africa; not caring about the people living there
- Slavery System + American Slavery System
- Jim Crow Laws
- Civil Rights Movement; Martin Luther King Jr.
Body Paragraph: Police
- Introduction: The police system is built to enforce systemic racism
- What is systemic racism: definition and examples
- Police initially created to capture runaway slaves
- After the abolishment of slavery, police system was to protect white people and white property
- Police system gives white supremacists and KKK members authority over minorities
Body Paragraph: Current Events
- The Black Lives Matter Movement
- Black Lives Matter vs All Lives Matter
- Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Gardner, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor
- Government's response, or lack of it
- International support: protests and government responses
- Call for reform: defunding the police so it won't be a local military army, find other methods to deescalate a situation without bringing a gun into the situation (i.e. a traffic stop or mental breakdown ends with a fatality by a gun; using negotiators, EMTs, and mental health care workers)
Conclusion:
- Restate Thesis Statement
- Conclusion: history and current events show the importance of the BLM movement
Let's have a breakdown of the outline.
Introduction:
The introduction should have about three to five sentences. The thesis statement doesn't have to be the first sentence in the introduction paragraph nor does it have to be just one sentence. In my opinion, two or three sentences are enough. Think of the thesis statement as the outline or the table of contents of your essay. The thesis must explain all the main points you will make in each body paragraph. In my example, my thesis statement explains that the BLM movement is important because of history, police, and current events. At the end of the introduction, like all of the paragraphs, you should make a transition sentence to help make your essay flow between points.
Body Paragraphs:
Unless otherwise stated, the general formula of an essay will have two to three body paragraphs. There should be a minimum of two, but you can always make more body paragraphs if you can think of more points. The body paragraph itself has a significant formula: introduction, evidence-comment-comment, evidence-comment-comment, and conclusion. For the introduction, it should state the main idea of the essay as can be seen in the example First or Second Body Paragraph.
Then there is the "evidence-comment-comment" which I learned from my AP Language teacher. How it works is that you bring in a piece of evidence that will take up a whole sentence and then follow it with two sentences of commentary. This formula can and should be easily changed to throw off the teacher-grader for believing you have this formula in the first place- as they don't really like you using a strict formula. So in one body paragraph, you can have two evidence-comment-comment sentences or six of them. So instead you can make it "evidence-comment" or "evidence-evidence-comment". Here is a body paragraph I made on the spot, see that the formula is intro-evidence-evidence-comment-comment.
"The police system was never created to protect an entire community, but only a certain group against the other. Slavery-era America created a police force to capture runaway slaves. After the abolishment of slavery, the police system was established to protect white people and white property from freed slaves for fear of retaliation. The police system has thus become a means for white supremacists to use the law to have authority over minorities. The history of the police shows that this current system is not effective in protecting and serving a community entirely."
Conclusion:
The conclusion is the easiest paragraph, which should be about three to five sentences, and by then you only have a few more minutes left on your timed essay. All you need to do is restate your thesis statement and make a summary of the points you made. Then you make your final sentence be about the main purpose of your essay.
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Different Types of Essays
This is straight from the textbook. I'll just be providing definitions and example prompts.
Narrative: Retells a story by presenting events in a logical sequence. (Example Prompt: Retelling the story of World War Two.)
Description: Describes the physical characteristics of a person, place, or thing. It can be based on these senses: sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell, emotional, and kinematic (movement). (Example Prompt: Describing what it's like to be bullied.)
Exemplification: Uses an example(s) to describe or explain a general position or an abstract concept. You can use observations, anecdotes, details, and opinions. (Example Prompt: Why vaccines are effective and important.)
Process: Explains in a sequence of steps how to do something or how something occurs. Similar to narration when presenting the events in chronological order, but is more logically-strict and doesn't depend on narrative/story-telling elements. (Example Prompt: Describing how a law is created.)
Cause and Effect: Examines the causes, describes the effects or does both. It can be related to both narrative or process essays. (Example Prompt: What processes and events contributed to the Earth's current climate change.)
Comparison and Contrast: Compares and contrasts two or more things- people, objects, places, processes, or events. (Example Prompt: Comparing and contrasting the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Lives Matter movement.)
Classification and Division: When given an assortment of information, you can break down this large group of information into smaller categories- dividing and classifying. You can use several of the previous essay types: process, cause and effect, comparison and contrast, and many more. (Example Prompt: Classify and divide different types of exercises.)
Definition: Explains what a term means and how it is different from other terms similar to it. You can use any of the previous essay types. (Example Prompt: Define what systemic racism is.)
Argumentation: Asserts an argument of a debatable position, belief, or conclusion. (Example Prompt: The abortion debate- the individual woman have the right to decide what they want to do to their body, not the state.)
Combining Essay Types: When given a prompt, you can use several essay types together to create your essay. This can be seen in the previous example prompts as you can use any combination of methods. You can see from the order of how the methods were introduced that the argumentation essay can use all of the previous methods.
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SOAPSTone
This is a useful acronym when having to analyze a reading.
Speaker: Who is telling the story? The narrator can be the author or someone else entirely.
Occasion: What is the time and place of the piece? This will help you understand the environment of the ideas, attitude and emotions of the work
Audience: Who is the intended audience given the purpose of the work and the methods used.
Purpose: What is the reason behind the work- the argument and logic.
Subject: You should be able to state what the subject of the work is.
Tone: What is the attitude of the author. You will need to analyze the diction (choice of words- are they simple or complex), the syntax (sentence structure- simple or complex), imagery (metaphors, similes, and other types of figurative language)
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AP Language Exam and Any Writing Exam
So from what I remember, the AP Lang exam had three types of essays you will need to write: synthesis, rhetorical analysis, and agree/disagree/qualify.
Synthesis: You are given one or more readings and you use them as evidence for your argument- you don't just summarize the readings but utilize them. You can use methods such as narrative, exemplification, cause and effect, and, obviously, argumentative.
Rhetorical analysis: You can analyze or argue a given reading. You need to observe their methods, rhetorical methods, and purpose- use SOAPSTone.
(Note: Rhetoric is awesome and is the heart and soul of AP Language. I think this is just the nerd in me writing this. It's the art of being effective in persuading and arguing when speaking or writing by using figures of speech and other techniques.)
Agree/Disagree/Qualify: You are given a prompt and you can either agree, disagree, and qualify.
(Note: The AP Language exam connects current events for this final prompt and expects for you to reference current events into your essay. My teacher made us be up to date to current events by writing essays about an article we found on NPR. My AP Language exam was after the 2016 US Election between Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton. The prompt asked to either agree, disagree, or qualify the argument that "the most essential skill... is artifice" which is using clever techniques to deceive others. I referenced and analyzed both sides of the 2016 election and their use of artifice.)
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The following is the email my AP Lang teacher sent us right before our AP Lang exam.
"A.P. LANG EXAM TIPS
Well, it is getting close to testing time! For those of you "tested out," gird your loins and suck it up!!! Consider these 10 helpful reminders as you get closer to "TEST DAY."
*****FIRST AND FOREMOST-BRING A TIMEPIECE & GOOD "PENS" TO THE EXAM*****
1) Get PLENTY of sleep the night before, and wake up at a reasonable time so as to arrive at the small gym calm and collected.
2) Bring some fruit as a snack-I'm not sure you will get a nutrition break.
3) The AP Language Exam will have four or five reading passages in the M.C. section so remember the 7 min. rule. Scan the test and if necessary, save the most difficult M.C. passage for the last seven minutes. You can then answer the line specific questions without reading the passage-should give you a few more correct answers as you push toward the magic 50%.
4) DO NOT SPEND MORE THAN 45 MINUTES ON ANY ESSAY!!!
5) MAKE SURE THE PROCTORS GIVE YOU 15 ADDITIONAL MINUTES FOR THE ESSAY SECTION-SHOUT IT OUT IF THEY FORGET! There will be three (3) essay prompts, but you should know the test maker's purpose for each. 1) The SYNTHESIS prompt will probably be #1 and the additional 15 minutes is reserved for you to scan the evidence documents. They will ask you to synthesize at least THREE (3) and include commentary that SHOWS why the chosen evidence proves your thesis. Stay organized! Make sure you mark or highlight the evidence you will use so when you start writing it's readily available. Within those 15 min. you should be able to compose your opening paragraph in the prompt booklet with a STRONG argumentative thesis. 2) The next prompt (probably Question #2) will be an ANALYSIS essay. They will ask you to discuss/argue the RHETORICAL DEVICES/STRATEGIES that the author uses to present his/her purpose/meaning. The prompt writer will suggest some devices-pick two or three and SHOW where and how the writer employs them to advance his/her purpose/meaning (don't be afraid to use the words RHETORIC, PURPOSE & MEANING in your essay-they are buzz words the A.P. Reader will be looking for). Organize your essay with some prewriting-work out the first paragraph and the Topic Sentences for the body paragraphs. 3) One of the essays (probably Question #3) will ask you to AGREE, DISAGREE, or QUALIFY. We know this as an ARGUMENTATIVE ESSAY, and if you remember 1st semester, we did a bunch of these. Set up a STRONG thesis and include evidence and commentary from your personal life (1 Par.), a current event or topical issue (1 Par.), and evidence from a work of literature (1 Par.). Be prepared! KEEP THE FOLLOWING IN MIND: Essay #1 (Synthesis) & Essay #3 involves CURRENT EVENTS!
6) They may be a bit tricky and ask you to compare/contrast two prose passages for the ANALYSIS essay. If so, during your prep time create a two-column chart to help your thought process. Itra-paragraph C & C is the most sophisticated method, but a paragraph for each passage and technique you are discussing works as well. Discuss what you KNOW-do not try to impress with fancy vocabulary. Give them YOUR voice!
7) At some point they will want you to discuss SATIRE and IRONY-you can count on it! My guess is, there will be an 18th or 19th century passage for you to compose your ANALYSIS essay around. If it sounds like Dickens you can BET money there is humor (satire & irony). If you DO NOT discuss satire and irony-YOU ARE DOOMED-DOOMED, I say!
8) FIND THE FUNNY!!! Recognizing the humor in a piece of literature ALWAYS demonstrates a student that has read the passage CLOSELY!!!
9) Review S.O.A.P.S.Tone. It is a quick tool that will set your explications up nicely.
10) Review your RHETORICAL DEVICES paper from 1st. semester. BE PREPARED!
Heck...YOU ARE PREPARED! Our class has set you up nicely to do a superb job on this exam-so, RELAX and prepare a sacrifice of Trinity, Kayden, Hamzur, or MAE MAE to the God's of English Literature! (JUST KIDDING!)
You are in my thoughts and prayers."
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General Writing Tips
- Because/And/But: You can start a sentence with "because", "and", and "but", but do so sparingly.
- Contractions: You shouldn't use contractions like "I'm", instead write "I am". Contractions are for dialogue. When you're writing a professional paper, you should not use contractions. Notice how I use shouldn't and should not. It's my work and it's not professional- don't @ me.
- Effect vs Affect: Effect is a noun. Affect is a verb. The Civil Rights Movement had a powerful effect on America. I was affected by the Civil Rights Movement because I no longer have to be discriminated against for being who I am.
- I vs Me: The difference between using I and me. What you need to do is take out the other names and see if the sentence makes sense. (Example: Anthony and I went on a date -VS- Anthony and me went on a date.)
- Present Tense vs Past Tense: When writing an essay, you should use the present tense, and use the past tense when referring to past events or an author's ideas for historical context.
- I'm blanking out for any other tips so comment here if you have other tips to share lol <3.
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Comment here if you have any other tips you'd like to share with others.
Comment here if you have any questions about this chapter and you want me to elaborate on it.
Rubix