READ THIS ENTIRE ENTRY BEFORE YOU START COMPOSING YOUR RESPONSE! :)
Hey there, sweet seniors! I'm so excited to welcome you to the wondrous world of literature exploration that is AP Lit. We're going to have a great time together this year reading, analyzing, discussing, and most importantly appreciating fine works of prose and poetry.
First, I want you to watch this awesome video by the inimitably amazing John Green:
Next, read this selection from Thomas C. Foster's How to Read Literature Like a Professor:
Along about now you should be asking a question, something like this: you keep saying that the writer is alluding to this obscure work and using that symbol or following some pattern or other that I never heard of, but does he really intend to do that? Can anyone really have all that going on in his head at one time?
Now that is an excellent question. I only wish I had an excellent answer, something pithy and substantive, maybe with a little alliteration, but instead I have one that's merely short.
Yes.
The chief deficiency of this answer, aside from its lack of pith, is that it is manifestly untrue. Or at least misleading. The real answer, of course, is that no one knows for certain. Oh, for this writer or that one we can be pretty sure, depending on what they themselves tell us, but in general we make guesses.
Since proof is nearly impossible, discussions of the writer's intentions are not especially profitable. Instead let's restrict ourselves to what he did do and, more important, what we readers can discover in his work. What we have to work with is hints and allegations, really, evidence, sometimes only a trace, that points to something lying behind the text. It's useful to keep in mind that any aspiring writer is probably also a hungry, aggressive reader as well and will have absorbed a tremendous amount of literary history and literary culture. By the time she writes her books, she has access to that tradition in ways that need not be conscious. Nevertheless, whatever parts have infiltrated her consciousness are always available to her. Something else we should bear in mind has to do with speed of composition. The few pages of this chapter have taken you a few minutes to read; they have taken me, I'm sorry to say, days and days to write...all I'm really saying is that we readers sometimes forget how long literary composition can take and how very much lateral thinking can go on in that amount of time (82-85).
Now ponder these questions in a written response: What evidence from your prior literature study do you have to support both Green's and Foster's claims? And what facets of John Green's video particularly connect with Foster's claims?
You might be wondering what I'm looking for in terms of quality here. A phrase you will get used to hearing me say this year is "3E." That stands for eloquent, exhaustive, and effective. Your response should be worded in a fluid fashion, free of grammar or spelling errors. Your response should be in-depth and detailed, leaving no stone unturned, so to speak. And your response should effectively respond to the prompt above, neglecting nothing as you provide considerable insight into the topic at hand.
That said, students always want to know what they should be shooting for length-wise. 3E responses are typically comprised of multiple paragraphs; in fact, most AP Lit students from past years end up needing to submit their entries in two parts (or more) because blogger only allows comments up to a certain length. When it comes to AP Lit writing, size matters, and the bigger the better. :) I would advise composing your response in a Word document, then cutting and pasting it here. That way you have a record of your responses and are also less likely to have your response vanish into the tubes of the inter webs without anything to show for it (it happens every year to someone...don't let it be you!).
Literature Lurve
