* A Siren is a character in classical Greek mythology, half woman and half bird, who lured sailors to their deaths by singing a seductive song.
Here’s a poem that relies a great deal on irony, similar to Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” which you worked on back in Chapter 3. This time, the poem we are studying comes with an essay question. Read the question and the poem and think about how you might write a response.
Read the following poem carefully, and then write a well-organized essay in which you discuss the author’s use of language to convey her themes.
* A Siren is a character in classical Greek mythology, half woman and half bird, who lured sailors to their deaths by singing a seductive song.
From Selected Poems by Margaret Atwood. Houghton Mifflin Co., 1987.
Before we delve into this specific poem, we want to discuss some differences between prose and poetry. Poems are special cases because they deal in compressed language. Lyric poems (most of the poems on the AP English Literature Exam are lyric poems) often use a convention, simple on the surface but infinite in its varieties and depth. In this convention, the speaker of the poem (the “I”) is addressing the reader directly, as prompted by a certain occasion or dramatic situation. If you pay attention to this lyric convention and its component parts, you may be able to understand a seemingly difficult poem more quickly. Not all poems on the AP Exam will exactly fit into this convention, but most will. The one we’ve chosen to discuss, “Siren Song” by Margaret Atwood, absolutely does.
In the previous chapter, we introduced the Idea Machine; three questions to consider when looking at a work of literature. Do you remember them?
What does the poem or passage mean?
How did the author get you to see that?
How do the answers to question 1 and 2 direct your knowledge to adequately answer the question?
The same three questions also apply to the poetry essay. Question 2, however, should be considered more like a drop-down kind of menu when you are writing about poetry.
Here are the three Idea Machine questions modified for the poetry essay:
What does the poem mean?
How did the author get you to see that?
What is suggested by the title?
Who is the speaker and who is the audience?
What is the dramatic situation that prompted the speaker to speak?
What problem is being explored in the poem, and does the poem find a solution?
How do the answers to the first two questions direct your knowledge to adequately answer the exam question?
You don’t have to ask or answer all of the secondary questions under question 2 but the more answers you can find to these questions, the better your essay will be. Let’s see how this method works by looking at a specific poem.
Like many poems, this one could be the focus of a long discussion. A full class period could be spent analyzing it as a group of interested students slowly circled it, discovered small details about it, and found ways to express their discoveries to each other. You don’t have that time.
We won’t be delving deeply into the many possible interpretations of this poem. The point here is to figure out what you could say about this poem in order to write an essay that answers the question. Let’s use the poetry essay Idea Machine—the simple, orderly process that you should apply to every AP English Literature essay.
First, tackle the question.
What’s the literal meaning of the poem?
It is the classic AP essay question. That makes our lives a little easier. The Idea Machine will work perfectly here.
Here is some background that may prove helpful to your understanding. The speaker is a Siren, a creature from Greek mythology. These creatures were notorious for using their “honey-voiced” song to attract sailors toward their island. When the sailors, entranced by the Siren’s voices, came in close to the island to try to catch a glimpse of the singers (who kept their hideous bird-shaped bodies out of sight), the sailors’ ship would be dashed on the dangerous rocks and all the passengers would die. This entire poem is an allusion to Homer’s The Odyssey. Odysseus, the main character, wants to hear the Sirens’ song but does not want to die before he can return to his home. He puts wax in the ears of his oarsmen and has them tie him to the mast so he cannot react to the song. Odysseus is nearly driven mad by the experience, but he and his ship pass the island safely.
If the AP Exam writers were to use this poem or another that relies heavily on allusions, the chances are that they would not provide the background that we just did. They might place an asterisk after the word “Siren” in the title and define it in a few words as we did, but unless you’ve read the original work of literature that the selected poem is referencing, the allusion will be mostly lost on you. For this reason, we are going to work with this poem as if you did not have any outside information about Homer or The Odyssey. Fortunately, you don’t need to grasp the allusion to understand this poem well enough to write a high scoring essay about it. Recognizing the allusion helps, and if you do recognize one, you should develop it in your essay as thoroughly as time permits, but the AP Exam writers will never choose a poem that relies on an allusion for its very sense.
Here’s a quick summary of what you should have in your mind after reading the poem:
The song being described in the first three stanzas has four main qualities: Everyone wants to learn the song; the song cannot be resisted once it is heard; the song causes men to leap out of their ships, into the sea and to their deaths; the song is unknown because those who have heard it are all dead.
The next three stanzas of the poem (lines 10–18) provide important information about the speaker, who is willing to trade a secret for the reader’s help in getting her out of her bird suit. The speaker reports being unhappy with her life. She does not like “squatting” or “looking picturesque and mythical.” She seems unsatisfied with the company she keeps, calling them, “feathery maniacs.” She even maintains that she doesn’t get any joy from singing, which seems to be her main occupation. She characterizes her song as a “trio, fatal and valuable.” In other words, the Siren song is sung with three voices and causes the death of those men throwing themselves overboard, who were mentioned in line 5.
The penultimate lines of the poem (lines 19–25) represent a shift in tone, as the speaker stops musing on her fate and directly addresses the reader. She is calling us closer to her, promising exclusive knowledge of this valuable secret she harbors, and she is claiming that only we can successfully answer her “cry for help.”
The tone shifts again in the closing lines of the poem. The speaker contradicts her earlier statement about the song’s irresistibility by claiming that it is “boring” despite its efficiency. The reader is to understand that the song has worked, insofar as the reader is now dashed and dead amongst the “beached skulls” of the other folks who responded to this Siren song in the past.
The four paragraphs preceding this one are a summary of the poem; they are not an essay. In fact, you can use these four paragraphs as a good example of what not to write on your AP essay. This literal reading is only a first step that will be a reflex for you if you practice it. Nothing is more mechanical or commonplace than a simple retelling of the passage. This kind of essay is going to score in the range of a 4 or a 5. If we apply the rest of the Idea Machine to this literal reading, we can move the score much higher. Let’s continue with the Idea Machine:
What is suggested by the title?
Who is the speaker and who is the audience?
What is the dramatic situation that prompted the speaker to speak?
What problem is being explored in the poem, and does the poem find a solution?
What feelings do you get from the poem?
What is the overall effect of the poem?
Let’s take these questions one by one.
What is suggested by the title? For only two words, the title is complex. It uses alliteration (in this case, the repetition of sibilant “S” sounds at the beginning of each word) and allusion (already discussed above). But more important for our current purposes, the title seems to call attention—through its use of the word “song”—to the idea that we may be reading lyrics that are meant to be sung, for all or part of the poem. Another function of the title might be to clue us in to the fact that the poem is describing the sensual characteristics of a Siren’s song. We’ll have to see, as we explore the other questions, which interpretation of the title seems more in keeping with our other answers.
Who is the speaker and who is the audience? The answer to this question is crucial for many poems, and especially important for this one. The speaker is a Siren. You might say that her audience is the reader, and you’d be correct, but you could also correctly observe that the author projects a role onto the reader—that of a sailor lost in the Siren’s song. This strategy is a common one in lyric poems. A reader of a Shakespearean sonnet, for example, might find himself being addressed directly, as if the reader were Shakespeare’s lover. The reader is meant, of course, to use his imagination. The reader is not supposed to respond to the poem and actually agree to marry the speaker of a four-hundred-year-old sonnet, but rather is supposed to understand that he is being directly addressed as if he were part of a dramatic situation.
What is the dramatic situation that prompted the speaker to speak? If you can put the dramatic situation of this poem into your own words, you are off to a good start. We know from our reading of literature that first-person narrators are not always trustworthy. How much do we trust this speaker, who complains of being trapped in a bird suit, is singing with two other feathery maniacs, and who promises us the answer to a secret? To what extent does her cry for help seem genuine? Because we have read the poem several times, we have the benefit of knowing the final three lines, in which she comes out from behind her mask and reveals that “it works every time.” The “it” is her song. The secret she has been promising us, which has kept us in suspense, has caused our death in the dramatic situation of the poem. We are yet one more group of sailors taken in. She has even told us that we would not be able to resist it, but we were somewhat fooled by this appearance of sincerity. Maybe we were immune. After all, wasn’t she the victim here? Her life was unenjoyable. She needed our help. “Come closer,” she said, and we did. We became “unique/at last,” at the very moment that we became like every other sailor who has had his skull beached because he could not resist the song.
What problem is being explored in the poem, and does the poem find a solution? Once you read the last three lines of this poem, you can easily realize that the earlier twenty-four lines were a performance. If the speaker was only saying “Help me!” in order to seduce the reader/sailor closer to the rocks, then the speaker was using irony, saying one thing while meaning another, to trap the reader. This observation is true, but the slippery nature of irony rarely stops at the first observational level. Isn’t it also possible to read “Help me!” as a sincere request? Couldn’t the speaker be fed up with the “boring song” of her seductive conquests? To what extent should a reader read past the first ironic level to a deeper, true level within the irony, where the speaker is stuck in a “bird suit” and can’t get out, doomed to fatally seduce all passersby? The problem of this poem has to do with the places where point of view and tone intersect. How much should the reader trust the speaker? Which part of the poem is more believable, the first 24 lines or the last 3? Why? How? The poem does not find an easy solution to these questions, so let’s move on to the feelings the reader gets from this poem.
What feelings do you get from the poem? You probably already noticed how the tool of “finding oppositions,” that we discussed at great length in the preceding chapter is coming into play in our discussion of this poem. The title has two possible meanings. The speaker has two mutually exclusive possible intentions. And the feelings a careful reader pulls from this poem are probably going to be in opposition also. Don’t let such discoveries unnerve or confuse you. The AP Exam will feature complex poems full of these kinds of tensions. If they didn’t, you’d have nothing to write about.
Readers of this poem often feel coaxed. For part of the poem, at least, the reader is likely to feel pleasure at being the object of someone else’s intense, intimate need. The speaker, after all, wants to share a secret with us. A secret establishes a bond between those who know the secret, and this speaker wants to create such a bond with us. We may be flattered, even if we recognize the foreshadowing in phrases such as “leap overboard,” “beached skulls,” and “fatal and valuable.” Some secrets are terrible and devastating, yet we understand ourselves to be privileged to hear this secret. The speaker has chosen us, believes us worthy. By listening to this secret, we may even be able to do some good. We feel a good deal of pity for this speaker, trapped as she is in a bird suit. She is squatting, which seems to make her vulnerable or maybe undignified. She is directly playing to our sympathies, begging us for help. How can we resist such persuasion?
If the reader feels compelled to learn the Siren’s secret to satisfy his or her own curiosity and to help the speaker out of a sense of generosity, then for the first 24 lines, the reader is responding in a similar manner—with keen interest—to apparently opposing forces: selfishness and selflessness. Combined, they make a powerfully magnetizing force that weakens only as the final three lines expose the preceding 24, as if a curtain were pulled back to reveal the mundane inner workings of an otherwise impressive spectacle. To go back to the allusion, these final three lines are analogous in form and content to the way that the sailors, drawn by the honey voices of the hidden Sirens, see the hideous appearance of the Sirens moments before their inevitable deaths. The reader usually feels tricked and cast off during the last three lines. The speaker, who had previously seemed so thoroughly interested, is now yawning, bored with the certainty of her own success.
What is the overall effect of the poem? Many readers have found great depth in this poem because it deals so ambivalently with seduction. The speaker has great power but seems trapped by that power. The song she sings is irresistibly fatal, yet she finds it to be dull and repetitive. The speaker, almost against her will, plays the victim in order to be the victor, but her performance of the part of the victim seems humiliating to her, and the victory is hollow.
Relax
Are you supposed to get all this in one or two readings in between checking your watch to make sure you have time for the next two essays? Not likely. We just wanted to show you how much there is to unearth in a typical AP Exam passage or poem and how much our techniques can dig up for you. All you’d need to see about this poem on the actual test is that the speaker is in some kind of opposition with herself. If you saw that and looked for the ways that Atwood got that opposition across, you’d find enough to write a great essay.
We came to all these points by thinking about the answers to the questions in italics and by looking for oppositions. But we also had the time we needed, and we’ve had some practice at this kind of thing before. So…
You should be ready to formulate your opening. Here’s an example:
“Siren Song” is a deceptively simple title that calls attention to the idea that human beings are sometimes undone by their desires, forced “to leap overboard in squadrons.” By the end of the poem, the speaker seems conflicted about her desires also.
Is this great writing? No. It won’t win any prizes. But for the AP Exam, such writing is well on its way to a high score. Anything beyond this will blow your Reader away. Let’s take it apart for a moment, and then we’ll finish the essay.
The beginning paragraph is a first stab at talking about meaning. We wanted to start with something more original than, “In ‘Siren Song’ by Margaret Atwood…” Starting that way is okay—and if the rest of your essay is good, you’ll score high—but the readers like to see you try something a little more daring. So, we connected the title to a feeling—the overall feeling of the poem—and it seemed to work. We connected the concrete image of the men forced to leap overboard in large groups with an abstract corollary: the idea that human desire can lead us into dangerous situations. Then we made a link back to the speaker’s own dilemma. This kind of work justifies our effort at an original beginning. The Reader would be impressed that you arrived so quickly at a main (but by no means obvious) point of the passage.
Unfortunately, we ran out of steam before we could satisfy the overall goal of our beginning: to get at the meaning of the poem (literal and emotional) and explain how Atwood gets it across (we barely started this process).
Because our first paragraph began with such originality, we can begin our second paragraph with “Atwood’s poem,” without fear of seeming dull or mechanical. We’ll start describing (not summarizing) what Atwood’s poem is, what it does, and how it does it. This is a song with a double meaning. Whenever you can show that a writer has created a double meaning, you have already risen in the estimation of the Reader, who has likely been dealing with single meanings for most of the last hour of her reading assignment. But we can’t stop there; we have to say what both meanings are. We might have analyzed any number of double meanings but we chose to stick with the speaker’s dilemma, which is one of the central contrasts of this poem. The poem is a song in two parts: The first part is a persuasive performance and the second part comments back on that performance, revealing it to be artificial and predictable. Now we are talking about two things at once, and on the road to a higher score.
Atwood’s poem is a song in two parts: the first part (lines 1–24) is a persuasive performance, and the second part (lines 25–27) comments back on that performance, revealing it to be artificial and predictable. The speaker is a Siren, and by her nature, has to entice people to their death. She admits this role to her reader, complains about it, asks for the reader’s help in releasing her from that role and then causes the death of the reader to ostensibly occur, even as he lives long enough to have the trick of it revealed in the final lines.
Not bad. Let’s do an essay check. Is the product of our Idea Machine complete? Not yet. We still haven’t said enough about how Atwood shaped the poem and we haven’t addressed our specific intention of writing about Atwood’s use of irony. Next, we need to commit ourselves to a statement about how Atwood shapes her imagery. What comes next is the most “mechanical” part of our opening, but such a formula is necessary as it will launch us into the rest of the essay.
Through the use of an ironic, untrustworthy, first- person speaker and through the careful use of tonal contrast, Atwood gives the reader a sense of the ambivalence human beings often have when they are involved in presenting manipulative, persuasive speech and actions.
There. We’ve said something. We’ve called attention to the persuasive performance, the ambivalence of the speaker and the literary tricks and methods that Atwood uses to communicate these aspects of the poem to the reader. Now it’s time to check again and pause briefly to consider what points we’ll make, and how we’ll address the specifics of this essay question.
What’s left? Let’s see. We are pretty thin on specifics. We’ve made assertions about irony and tonal contrast, but we should still support these assertions with concrete examples from the text. We have said that there are no checklists for the Readers to use, but one aspect of your writing that every reader will look for is your fluid use of specific evidence to prove your point. Without evidence, your essay is an empty series of assertions. At least with evidence, your essay starts to follow through on your argument.
Here’s the rest of our essay:
Who is being manipulated in the poem? The answer is not entirely clear. On the first level of irony, the level where the speaker pleads “Help me,” the reader is being manipulated to feel pity for the speaker and to “come closer” in order to provide some relief. The fact that the speaker has already provided the gruesome imagery of “beached skulls” as what results if one were to follow her “irresistible” song only makes the manipulation more impressive. It is as if a salesmen told you about other customers he had bilked before cheating you, and you were still powerless in the face of his persuasive force. Atwood, however, is not only interested in this first level of irony. She also wants to draw the reader’s attention to the condition of the manipulator. The Siren asks for the reader’s pity, ironically, as a way of seducing the reader, but then earns the reader’s pity, more sincerely, in the last three lines when she reveals how tedious the whole process is for her. This tonal contrast, “boring” as opposed to the earlier “irresistible” provides the main shape of Atwood’s poem. The writer wants the reader to feel complex and mutually exclusive allegiances. The reader will momentarily sympathize with the men forced to “leap overboard in squadrons” to their deaths, but feel a deeper, more compelling pity for the speaker trapped in a “bird suit,” who reports that she does not enjoy her fatal role in life, even as she efficiently performs it. After giving in to the urge to “come closer” to hear the Siren’s secret and to help her escape her plight, the reader is likely to feel cheated because the speaker suddenly shifts her tone: “Alas/it is a boring song/but it works every time.” After the speaker moves beyond the feeling of being cheated—the reader is not actually dashed against the rocks—he can better appreciate the ironic pain of the Siren, who is doomed to victimize others through her natural singing voice.
That’s the end of our essay. It’s not that long and much more could have been said. But that’s it. That’s all the time we had. So we wrote that and moved on. We checked our watch, and it said that we had used up 40 minutes. Is it the best piece of writing we’ve ever done? No. But will it earn a high score? Yes, high enough. Why?
First, as we said, the AP Readers are forgiving of some mistakes. The opening of the essay lets the Readers know that we understand some of the main aspects of the poem and are able to put these understandings into fairly clear sentences. Second, the essay continues to make good points. It talks about irony and the speaker’s trustworthiness and the tonal contrast in the last few lines of the poem. We spread out well-chosen examples from most stanzas in the poem and we draw attention to the manipulative aspects of the tone. We might have overdone the bit about the salesman, but so what? We didn’t digress for long, and we weren’t being overly repetitive. The Readers want to see your ideas. By making these insights clear and obvious to the Reader, you make it easy for the Reader to give you a better score.
Is this a well-organized essay? Not by the standards of the writing process. If you were writing for a take-home essay, this would be more like a free-writing, brainstorming session on the journey to a finished project, but by AP standards, this essay is pretty good. The essay begins with a clear direction, moves on to a consideration of double meanings and oppositions, and finishes with specifically developed examples of imagery, irony, and tonal contrast. For a first draft done in just 40 minutes top to bottom, the essay is admirable and will probably receive a 7.
Let’s look at another sample. If you’ve got paper and pencil handy, try the question that follows and time yourself. At the very least, before you go to our sample essays (we’ve written two sample responses to this passage, one great and one fair) think about your first paragraph and try writing it in your head. But you really should practice writing a whole essay under time constraints.
Read the following passage carefully. Write a well-organized essay that discusses the author’s use of the resources of language to dramatize the speaker’s experiences of life at sea as well as to dramatize the character of that speaker.
From Ultramarine by Malcolm Lowry.
This 1933 novel follows Dana Hilliot, a young lad from a well-off family, as he ventures to sea as a sailor.
1 My girl (Latin).
2 The men that tend the steam engines and boilers of the ship.
3 bouillion
Did you practice writing the essay on this passage? Did you time yourself? If so, great; if not, we hope you at least read the passage carefully and thought about how you would go about writing your first paragraph.
Oddly enough, writing about prose can actually be more difficult than writing about poetry. Poetry often presents many difficulties to the reader caused by the density and complexity of poetic language. However, once interpreted, those same difficulties give you material to write about. Prose presents the opposite problem. In general, assimilating the passage is pretty easy; the challenge is finding something worth saying about it. It is useful to remember that the literary devices you look for in poetry can also be pointed out in your prose essays.
As always, start out with the classic question and let the Idea Machine guide your thinking process. Of course, make sure that you allow the question to focus the development of your essay, and also note the time so that you don’t go overboard and come up short on the last essay.
Below you’ll find two responses to the passage. One is excellent, the other is mediocre. We’ll discuss both responses after the samples are given. By the way, in these two essays we’ve taken out the annoying errors of diction and spelling that creep into every student’s essay. We want you to read the essays for what they say and how they say it without distracting errors. The sentence construction reflects student writing, but in reality, both essays would have more language mistakes.
In the passage, Malcolm Lowry effectively uses the resources of language to create an interior monologue (a mental speech) to dramatize the adventures a young English boy has aboard a ship, and shows the character of the boy, Dana Hilliot, as well. He uses vivid imagery and many details from the boy’s life to show who Hilliot is and what he thinks, and captures the different rhythms of life aboard a ship.
First Hilliot thinks that no one, “not even my supervisor would recognise me…” This shows that Hilliot thinks that he has changed and that life at sea has changed him. But he’s happy, he likes the change, as he says, “The whole deep blue day is before me.” But there are many conflicting feelings in Hilliot as he sits and drinks his coffee. For he quickly screams out, “this is what sea life is like now—a domestic servant on a treadmill in hell!” This shows the conflict that Hilliot undergoes. He doesn’t know whether he thinks life at sea is great or a stinking hell. Lowry shows this by switching all the time between images that are pleasant, and images that are full of misery and despair and heartbreak. He really misses Janet and it shows. A sailor’s life is lonely, and Lowry shows that. Lonely and boring sometimes, as hard as that may be to believe. But the boredom is broken up by danger and hardship. “We batter the rusty scales off the deck with a carpenter’s maul until the skin peels off our hands like the rust off the deck…” is an example of the hardship. But immediately, the conflict shows up again. The very next sentence is, “Ah well, but this life has compensations, the days of joy even when the work is most brutalising.”
Through it all though, Hilliot thinks of Janet. He begins thinking of her “Puella mea…,” which is Latin for “my girl” and ends saying “Oh, Janet, I do love you so.” This tells us a great deal about Hilliot. He misses his girlfriend and is probably homesick for England too. These are normal reactions for the character of a young Englishman far from home, and by framing the story between these statements Lowry shows that the character of Dana Hilliot hasn’t changed as much as he thinks it has. Hilliot is still a lonely young man with a great deal to learn.
Who hasn’t dreamed of throwing everything away and running off to sea? And yet very few people actually do run off to sea, probably because, at least in part, they realized (around the time they’re packing all those wool sweaters into a duffle bag) that life at sea isn’t just dropping anchor at exotic ports and gazing at the moon setting over the Indian Ocean. It’s a hard, dangerous life. Better unpack the sweaters.
The passage shows the inner thoughts of one young man who actually did run off, and as he sits and thinks of the life he’s leading and the life he’s left behind, we get a picture of what a young sailor’s life is really like. We get something else as well, a detailed portrait of a young, confused man, Dana Hilliot, and all the swirling emotions that he carries in his young heart. Hilliot is lonely, defiant, excited, bored, romantic, and cynical all at once.
The passage begins, “Puella mea…” Although that’s Latin for “my girl,” the translation isn’t so important as the fact that it’s Latin. Right from the beginning, Lowry shows us a fish out of water. Dana’s educated, but how many of Dana’s shipmates speak Latin? Probably none. Dana talks about how unrecognizable he’s become. Maybe he really is unrecognizable to his old friends, but it’s more likely that he can’t recognize himself. He’s gotten more than he bargained for, “this is what sea life is like now—a domestic servant on a treadmill in hell!” This is one of the recurring themes of the passage. Hard, dull, work. Polishing brass. Chipping paint. Scrubbing and cleaning. It isn’t a very romantic scenario. This theme tells us not just about sea-life, but about Dana. He must have been pretty naïve to not know that a sailor works from daybreak into the night, and it’s all manual labor.
Lowry gives us a picture of the wild, terrifying, intense life that Dana thought he was going to lead. He describes it to his girlfriend, to correct her and tell her the truth, but you can be sure that these were Dana’s ideas of life at sea before he came to the ship. “Perhaps you think of a deep gray sailing ship lying over in the seas, with the hail hurling over her: or a bluenose skipper who chewed glass so that he could spit blood…” Well, Dana has learned that it isn’t anything like that at all. His romantic dreams have been squashed, all except the sea. He still finds poetry in the sea. It is “ever the path to some strange land, some magic land of faery…” This is the beauty that Dana really got on board for.
The passage then takes us even deeper into Dana’s character. In the beginning, he talked about how horrible it was to be just a lackey, scrubbing decks. As he thinks deeper though, we see a real change in him. He loves the moments of calm, and is such a sensitive experiencer of the life around him that he even notes the way one of his fellows’ joints crack, but the amazing thing is that he’s learned to love the work. He describes it with relish, “I feel almost joyful with my chipping hammer and scraper. They will follow me like friends…The rust spurts out from the side in a hail of sharp flakes, always right in front of our eyes, and we rave, but on on!” The work, the hard relentless work, is the real adventure, and in those words “on on!” you can hear almost hear Dana’s amazement at the fact that he can do it, he can keep going on.
In the end Dana’s loneliness, cut off from his familiar life, returns him to being a moody “Romeo,” dreaming of his girlfriend, imagining sweet-talking her. It wells up in him with the line, “Oh, Janet, I do love you so.” But then comes the very last line of the passage, another abrupt change, “But let us have no nonsense about it.” He’s still a young person, pouring out his love to his girlfriend but then a second later he’s pretending to be a tough guy, a sailor, who wants “no nonsense.” By putting these lines, one after the other, Lowry shows Dana in the midst of growing up, and pretending to be more hardened than he is.
It shouldn’t be too difficult to tell which is the better of the two responses. Essay 1 is clearly an average response from an intelligent student struggling to write a response about a passage he didn’t get much from. Notice the mechanical repetition of the question and the mechanical, plodding way he works through the passage, not so much interpreting as it is summarizing. He did manage to address the question somewhat and did pull together a few simple insights into the passage. He would receive a score of 5. Not a terrible score by any means, but you can do better.
The biggest mistake the author of the first essay made was to choose to emphasize the life-at-sea aspect of the question. Unless an author is just setting the stage for what is to come, or planting some enormous symbol, almost every sentence in a novel or a story is intended to reveal character. This is especially true of the kind of masterful writers you’ll be dealing with on the AP Exam. When you read prose on the AP Exam, always ask yourself what the sentences tell you about the people in the passage. In the Lowry passage, everything Dana thinks tells us something about Dana. The first student missed most of the psychological details of the passage and ended up floundering.
The author of the second essay worked with the Idea Machine. She asked herself about both the literal and emotional content of the passage. She kept an eye out for strong imagery and evidence of opposites. In doing so, she saw that the passage was filled with conflicting images. Dana loves Janet, but then wants “no nonsense.” Dana thinks the work is beneath him (“domestic servant”—Dana’s the kind of kid who’s used to having servants, not being one) and makes his shipboard life hell, but at the same time he realizes that when he’s lost in the physical frenzy of the labor, he finds the work exhilarating. The author of the second essay tried to put these oppositions together in a meaningful way. Most important, she knew to focus on character. By tying everything back to Dana’s character she assured herself of a high score. In fact, the second essay would be scored a 9—the top score.
Also notice that the second passage does not begin with the typical restatement of the question. That doesn’t mean that a Reader would look at the beginning of the second sample essay and think, “Oh my, what an original opening—this essay gets a high score.” A nice opening isn’t enough. You still have to write the essay. But, the Reader would think, “Hmm, this kid isn’t writing like a robot…now if she can show me she understood the passage and communicate her understanding with anything like the flair of this opening, I’ll give her a high score.” In other words, yes, your opening can be a little stiff and dull (yes, you can paraphrase the question if you want to) if you write an otherwise good, insightful essay, but an original, interesting opening is better if you can write one without wasting a lot of time.
After reviewing some sample essays, you probably have a good sense of what you need to accomplish to achieve a solid score. Some of this may seem basic and verge on the formulaic. Remember that your good ideas do need to be clear and well- organized. The following are tips for reviewing your own practice essays.
Your first paragraph should
grab the reader (don’t worry if you can’t do this, but it helps)
answer the question in the prompt
preview the evidence you’ll use to support your ideas
Your first paragraph should not
go off on a tangent
ignore the prompt
merely restate the wording of the prompt
Your body paragraphs should
have clear transitions and topic sentences
provide evidence, in the form of quotations from the prompt, that supports your opinion
explain how that evidence supports your point of view
Your body paragraphs should not
rely on plot summary
let quotation outweigh analysis
ramble
Your conclusion should
exist
sum up the evidence for the jury
contain any profound insights about the work that may have occurred to you while writing
Your conclusion should not
suggest you didn’t budget your time
merely restate the introduction or prompt
Avoid summary.
Get a feel for the passage.
Notice imagery.
Notice oppositions.
Your essay doesn’t have to be great, but you do have to show command of the English language. An AP essay that scores a 9 might not even be an “A” paper in English class. Of course not. It’s a 40-minute essay on a story or poem you’ve never seen before.
Whenever possible, show your verbal flair.
It’s okay to establish the foundation of your essay in two or three short opening paragraphs, if necessary.
Your first paragraph should be free of error, but nobody writes an error-free paper. That doesn’t mean be careless and sloppy. It means write as well as you can and don’t worry about mistakes.
If the question gives you the opportunity, write about character. The writing in AP passages almost always says something about character. This is especially true in the dialogue of a character, or in a first-person narration.
A nice opening is icing on the cake.
Make sure you leave yourself enough time to write a complete conclusion.
Respond to the following questions:
Of which aspects of poetry essays do you feel you have achieved sufficient mastery to write a high-scoring essay based on a poem?
On which aspects of poetry essays do you feel you need more work before you can write a high-scoring essay based on a poem?
Of which aspects of prose essays do you feel you have achieved sufficient mastery to write a high-scoring essay based on a work of prose?
On which aspects of prose essays do you feel you need more work before you can write a high-scoring essay based on a work of prose?
What parts of this chapter are you going to re-review?
Will you seek further help, outside of this book (such as from a teacher, tutor, or AP Students), on any of the content in this chapter—and, if so, on what content?