This last part won’t be formally integrated into your essay, but it’s extremely helpful as you try to stay focused and pointed while writing what can feel like an impossible broad essay.Ĥ. You definitely want to write your thesis plan the topics of your body paragraphs, including potential topic sentences and-a helpful, oft-forgotten third part-remind yourself why the work you’ve chosen is the best for the prompt. What should your outline include? Keep it clear and concise. We recommend devoting 5-7 minutes to your outline-the lower end if you’re confident you know the text inside and out and just need to nail down your claims and evidence, and the higher end if you need to jog your memory and give your thesis a bit more time to gestate. This is the place where your reasoning and organization come alive. Whether for AP exams, the SAT, or the ACT, you’ve heard the dictum a million times-outlines make better essays, even when your time feels extremely limited! When it’s time for the test, this can feel a little bit trite, but we challenge you to find one soul in the grand history of the AP English Literature exam who hasn’t benefited from creating even a rough outline. We recommend practicing with a work no more than two or three times-it’s great to know a text inside and out, but you don’t want to be a one-trick pony in case the prompt on the exam doesn’t lend itself to an essay about that text. In the weeks leading up to the exam, we recommend selecting three to seven prompts-the more diverse in content, the better-and practicing with your list of works of literary merit. You don’t know what the third free-response prompt will be, but you know that it will be! The College Board’s AP Lit exam page is only one of a gazillion easily accessible resources online that compile prompts from past years and devise hypothetical ones, too. This way, if you’re on the fence about whether a work is really “of literary merit,” you can ask your teacher or someone else in the know for an expert second opinion! 2. As you’ve learned to do in class, consider each work’s rhetorical situation. We recommend creating a short list of works you’d like to write about before you take your AP Lit exam, just to have your options at hand. Your second option is to pick a work you’ve read on your own, which could be anything from a novel you adored over summer break or the Shakespeare play you starred in at school. Because you read it in class, you will almost surely be familiar with its themes and literary devices. The first is probably the most common: choose a book, play, or other literary work you read in AP Lit.
You have two main options for selecting the perfect work, both equally effective. You want to find a work that is challenging and complex in order to show that you’re capable of effectively analyzing such works.
AP LIT ESSAY GRADER HOW TO
A good rule to live by: if a work pops into your head and you don’t immediately have at least a few different ideas for how to answer the prompt with it, toss it out of your brainstorming process. You’re not going to be judged for the work you select, as long as it’s substantial enough to ensure your analysis can be rich and meaningful. Wait a minute-you can write about anything under the sun, as long as the College Board defines it as “a work of literary merit?” How is that even possible? In truth, your evaluators are using this prompt as a way to gauge your analytical abilities no matter the text.
Here are five tips to help you write a great essay response to the third prompt on the AP Lit exam. And it certainly doesn’t help that this question comes at the very end of the essay, and you and your fingers are about as tired as they could possibly be!īut if you approach the prompt with enthusiasm, it can be the cherry on top of your exam, not the straw that breaks the camel’s back (getting creative with metaphors is always important in AP Lit!). Anyone would admit that such a capacious (‘open, roomy’) question is challenging, especially when a year of AP Lit has taught you to focus on the details of the book you’re reading. The last of these prompts attracts perhaps the most attention and, by extension, produces the most anxiety among students.
Third, you’ll analyze a major literary aspect-a theme or a literary device, for example-of a literary work of your choosing. Second, you’ll write a literary analysis of a piece of fiction, which could be an excerpt from a play. This year, if you’re taking the AP English Literature exam, you’ll be responsible for responding to three questions, which the College Board calls “free response prompts.” First, you’ll write a literary analysis of a poem.
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