Chapter 4

How to Approach the Essays: Basic Principles

 

ESSAY SECTION TASKS

Yes, that’s right—tasks. You’ll need to write three different essays: synthesis, rhetorical analysis, and argument.

In the synthesis essay, you’ll be given a scenario and tasked with writing a response using at least three of six or seven short accompanying sources for support. You’ll need to cite the sources you use (in a simple format such as “Source A”), and incorporate them into your own position (instead of simply quoting them). At least one of the sources will be a visual (such as a picture, drawing, or graph) rather than text.

The rhetorical analysis essay asks you to analyze the techniques (such as choice of language or organization of points) an author uses, and discuss how those techniques contribute to the author’s purpose. The passage you’ll be asked to analyze is typically about a page long.

The argument essay presents a claim or assertion in the prompt and then asks you to argue a position based on your own knowledge, experience, or reading. You can choose to agree with the claim, disagree with it, or give it qualified support (for example, arguing that the claim is true only in certain circumstances).

In Chapters 5–7, you’ll learn more about the approach and expectations for each type of essay.

For all three essays, you will be writing cold on a prompt or passage you read just two minutes ago for the first time. You have to come up with good ideas and get them written down efficiently—on the very first try.

Writing a clear, effective, well-organized essay under rigid time constraints is a learned skill; writing three consecutive essays under such conditions requires special techniques and lots of practice. Fortunately, this book provides you with both of those.

Three Rules for Successful Essay Preparation

1. Do plenty of TIMED practice on all three essay types.

2. Hand-write your practice essays; don’t use a computer.

3. Ask for feedback on your essays from a trusted source (such as an English teacher or Princeton Review tutor).

Time Crunch

You’ll have 2 hours to write all three essays, which allows about 40 minutes for each. Before you even start working on the essays, though, you’ll have 15 minutes to read all three prompts and the source documents for the synthesis essay. While we suggest you use all 15 minutes, if you finish reading the prompts and the documents early, you may start writing your response.

This 15-minute period is crucial for building a solid foundation in understanding the prompts and the source documents. You’ll need to put your active reading skills in high gear to get the best possible head start from the reading time available.

Why Three Essays?

The AP English Language and Composition Exam is designed to predict your ability to perform college-level work on such assignments as research papers and on-demand essay questions on tests. The AP exam’s three types of essays essentially give you an opportunity to demonstrate some of the important skills required for those types of college assignments:

The three essays simply separate—and highlight—these skills. In college work, you’ll often be combining them.

HOW ARE THE ESSAYS SCORED?

The essays are scored separately on a scale of 0–9; then the three scores are combined. Each essay has equal weight in that combined score, which is then combined with the result of the multiple-choice section to yield a final AP score of 1–5.

Together, the essays count for 55 percent of your final score. However, they take up 69 percent of the exam time, so it’s easy to lose perspective and feel as if the essay section is more crucial to your success than it actually is. Doing well on the multiple-choice section is almost as important, even though it’s only an hour long.

The grading is holistic, meaning that the reader will assess the overall quality of the essay rather than using a point-by-point checklist to arrive at a score. There are only a couple of exceptions, such as using fewer than three sources in the synthesis essay or consistently expressing ideas in such a confused way that the reader has great difficulty following the argument. Such lapses automatically knock an essay down to a lower point on the scoring scale.

Essays are graded holistically, based on the overall impression created by

• your grasp of the prompt

• your ability to present concrete evidence and link it to your thesis

• your skillful use of language to develop your argument

Who Does the Scoring?

The readers are college English professors and AP course teachers who come together in June for an intense week of scoring. Thousands of readers go through thousands of essays in a few short days. A different person will read each of your essays.

Before the scoring starts, though, readers are trained in assessing that particular year’s group of essays. Educational Testing Service (ETS), the nonprofit organization that develops the exam, combs through the current crop of essays looking for work that represents a top-level 9 synthesis essay, a mediocre 4 rhetorical analysis essay, and so on, from that year’s group. These sample essays are used to train the readers so the scoring will be as standardized as possible, given that the readers are still human beings who make subjective decisions.

So what? Well, the readers are your audience—the people you’re addressing in your essays—and this scoring process tells you a few important things about them.

The essay section is the only place in this exam where your personality—at least to a limited degree—will shine through to test graders. Use it as an opportunity to show off what an exceptional thinker and writer you are.

What Are the Characteristics of Each Score Level?

The 0–9 scale breaks down into four categories: effective, adequate, inadequate, and little success.

Effective essays score between 7 and 9. These are the essays with thorough and convincing discussions, perceptive analyses, well-developed positions, smooth organization, and sophisticated control of expression. They demonstrate that the writer has understood and thought about the prompt and created an original response.

Adequate essays score 5 or 6. They address the prompt with appropriate explanations and evidence, do an adequate job of organizing and developing points, and express the writer’s ideas clearly.

Inadequate work receives a score of 3 or 4. In these essays, the writer may have misunderstood the prompt or (in the case of the synthesis essay) the sources. Evidence and explanations are limited or simplistic, or even flat-out inappropriate. The organization does not flow smoothly, and the writer has less control of English language conventions in expressing ideas.

Essays that demonstrate little success receive a score of 0, 1, or 2. Here the writer has oversimplified or completely misunderstood the prompt, and presented evidence that is inappropriate or just plain unrelated. These essays show a consistent weakness in expressing ideas in a clear, organized, and grammatically correct way.

Essays fall within one of those four categories based on the general characteristics of that category. The specific score within the two higher bands reflects more or less skill and depth in demonstrating those characteristics. Within the two lower bands, the number score reflects varying degrees of problems.

For all three essays, the 2016 mean score—the mid-point in the range, where half of the essays scored higher and half lower—around 4.5, which could be considered “high inadequate” (if you can imagine such a concept).

In Chapters 5–7, you’ll learn some more details about how these score levels apply to each type of essay.

WHAT ARE THE KEYS TO REACHING THE “EFFECTIVE” BAND?

Your goal is to rise above the vast middle bulge of essays that score 4 or 5. You’re aiming for the “effective” band, or at least for a 6. How do you get there? By familiarizing yourself with the types of essays you’ll have to write and by following a few basic tips.

Understand the Prompt

Use your active reading skills to tear the prompt apart.

Take a Position

No fence-sitting, no ambiguity, no neutral descriptive essays. The highest scoring essays take a definite position on the prompt topic and argue it convincingly. They use strong, relevant evidence to support the position and leave no doubt about where the essay writer stands.

Even in the rhetorical analysis essay you’re expected to take a position: “This is the author’s purpose, these are the three (or four, or five) most important techniques the author uses to achieve that purpose, and (very important) this is how each technique makes the purpose more effective.” Another student might see a different purpose or highlight other techniques in the passage, but then that student would be taking a different position.

Manage Your Time

No one is going to tell you that your first 40 minutes are up and it’s time to move on to the next essay. That’s up to you. Since each essay has equal weight in the combined score, you should devote about the same amount of time to each one. A slightly better score on one essay will not make up for a bad score on another. Aim for the following breakdown within each 40-minute period:

The more you practice writing each type of essay within 40 minutes, the more you’ll gain a sense of how that block of time “feels” and the better you’ll get at making occasional time checks to stay on track instead of engaging in distracting clock-watching that might only increase your anxiety.

Your school has likely given you sample essay prompts for practice. You can also find example prompts from several previous years on the AP website at https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/​courses/​ap-english-language-and-composition/​exam.

BC UR 2 GOOD 4 THIS

Even though you’re under tremendous time pressure, don’t use shorthand symbols such as “&” or “w/” or “tho.” Get into the habit of using a relatively high level of discourse on AP exam essays. Writing in the style of a casual email or text message won’t impress the reader who is scoring your essay.

Plan Your Response

Just getting into the car and starting to drive could land you anywhere, at a great waste of time and fuel. It’s the same with just starting to write—you could easily spend 20 minutes and then realize you’re seriously off track.

To make the best use of your 30–35 minutes of writing time, you first need to spend a few minutes planning where you want to end up and how you’ll get there.

Organize Your Points

You’re likely familiar with the five-paragraph essay model. While it’s not the only method of organizing an essay, there’s nothing wrong with using it on this exam if it’s already a comfortable model for you. It goes like this:

Paragraph 1:

Paragraphs 2–4:

Paragraph 5:

Of course, there’s no rule that says you have to stop at three pieces of evidence; you might have four. Just don’t take on more complexity and length than you can handle well in 40 minutes. And if you’re familiar with another method of organizing an essay and feel more comfortable with it, then use it, as long as it provides a clear organizational framework for your points.

Get Off to a Strong Start

A great first impression goes a long way. Remember your audience of bored readers mired in stacks of mediocre essays? If you can wow them right off the top, you’ll create an expectation that the rest of your essay belongs in the “effective” band, too. That initial glow of “finally—finally—a good essay!” can diminish the impact of later lapses in greatness.

Suppose the prompt for a rhetorical analysis essay quotes from a speech by Mayor Nellie Smith attributing her election victory to the many volunteers who worked on her campaign. You could clearly announce, “This is going to be a mediocre essay” by starting out with a sentence like, “This essay will describe how Mayor Nellie Smith uses rhetorical strategies to communicate the main point of her speech.” Yawn. And do you have any clue what her main point is or what rhetorical strategies she uses? Even if you eventually do get to an insightful point later in the essay, chances are your opening has already caused the reader to tune out and miss it.

On the other hand, you could grab the reader’s attention with an opening like, “Dedicated volunteers are the bricks and mortar of successful political campaigns. That’s the overriding message of Mayor Nellie Smith’s speech thanking them for their passionate support and acknowledging the key role they played. Through the skillful use of parallelism, repetition, and analogy, she makes her listeners feel that the victory is really theirs, likely winning their support after she takes office, too.”

That stronger start doesn’t take a lot of extra effort or time, but it shows the reader that you understand the mayor’s purpose and rhetorical strategies, and can express your ideas with style and sophistication. You’ve just raised the reader’s impression of your abilities, even if your essay tapers off to a more routine effort later on.

Express Your Ideas Clearly, Specifically, Concisely, Correctly, Smoothly, Persuasively, and with Flair

Oh yes, you can do that.

Be clear. You should know exactly what you want to say as a result of your initial planning and organizing. Imagine yourself on a clear path instead of stumbling around in the underbrush. If you find you’re getting tangled up in long sentences or overlapping ideas, pause for a minute and think of telling someone right beside you what you mean to say. This strategy usually helps clarify your thoughts and language in your own mind. Now write down what you just “said.”

Be concise. Making a vague statement such as, “The demand for subsidized housing increased a lot during the past few years (Source A)” isn’t good enough if Source A actually referred to a study that proved demand grew by 65 percent between 2000 and 2010. Being as specific and concrete as possible will add credibility and impact to your words. Your argument will be clearer and more persuasive.

Be concise. That doesn’t mean leaving out details that are essential to your argument. It means leaving out pointless repetition and padding. Say it once, precisely and with punch, and then move on.

Say it correctly. Use proper grammar. Essays with so many errors that the reader can’t follow the argument are consigned to the bottom of the scoring scale.

Create correct paragraphs, too. Have you ever opened a book and seen nothing but very long paragraphs? Your next thought is probably, “Do I really have to read all of this?” That’s exactly what readers think when they see an essay without paragraphs.

So create proper paragraphs—one main idea per paragraph, beginning with a topic sentence and ending with a smooth transition to the next paragraph—and make them obvious by leaving a space between or indenting them.

Create a great first impression before the person scoring your essay even reads a word.

Say it smoothly. Lead the reader through your argument with seamless transitions between your points and paragraphs. Transition words and phrases such as “on the other hand,” “in addition,” “therefore,” and “nevertheless” will do the job.

The reader expects you to write like someone who is suffering through a tedious, nerve-racking exercise. If you write like someone who enjoys writing, the reader will enjoy reading your essay and reward you.

Say it persuasively. These essays are all evidence-based writing, so you need strong evidence that supports each of your main points. Connect each piece of evidence clearly to the point it supports, and explain exactly how or why the evidence is relevant. Unrelated evidence and vague, weak explanations won’t persuade anyone.

Say it with flair. Is there a punchier, more descriptive word you could use? Perhaps “shack” or “cabin” or “mansion” instead of “house.” Can you make the phrasing of a sentence slicker? For example, instead of “The candidate’s appearance was neat, and the boss gave him the job right away,” let yourself get carried away and say, “The candidate’s Armani suit and sleek silk tie captivated the boss, who slipped a contract across the table without comment or hesitation.”

It doesn’t take long to think of a more forceful word or a stronger way of saying something if you put your mind on that track, and even a few of these sprinkled throughout your essay can impress the reader with your ability to control language and use it to achieve your desired effect.

Make it easy for the reader to give you a high score.

Proofread

You won’t have time to revise, but leaving a couple of minutes to proofread allows you to fix minor errors you probably would not have made if you weren’t writing in such a rush. And that, in turn, might just knock your essay up a notch on the scoring scale. You’ll have to write your essay in dark blue or black pen—no pencils allowed on this section of the exam. However, you can strike out any errors you want the readers to ignore (they will) and then write in (neatly) your correction.

In Chapters 5–7, you’ll get a closer look at the types of prompts on the exam, and find additional suggestions for responding to the three different types.

 

Summary

General Essay Information

Essay Scoring

Presentation

Expression

Content