Description:  This course offers a rigorous curriculum that focuses on effective use of rhetoric, including tone, voice, diction and sentence structure.  It requires students to analyze and write in multiple forms about a variety of subjects.  Students will read a variety of texts, which are presented with a specific focus on the core elements of rhetoric: writing with a specific purpose, addressing and appealing to a specified audience, maintaining structurally-sound discourse, and effecting an appropriate style.  Emphasis is placed on critical thinking as well as reading and writing analyses required by the AP test, which students are encouraged to take in May, following completion of this course.  Although AP English Language and Composition is recommended for students in grade 11, students in grade 12 may also enroll.  This course counts as 1.00 English credit toward graduation, and it is weighted 1.25%.  A summer reading project is required.

Objectives: According to The College Board website, Advanced Placement Language and Composition students should be able to achieve the following:

• analyze and interpret samples of good writing, identifying and explaining an author’s use of rhetorical strategies and techniques;
• apply effective strategies and techniques in their own writing;
• create and sustain arguments based on readings, research, and/or personal experience;
• write for a variety of purposes;
• produce expository, analytical, and argumentative compositions that introduce a complex central idea and develop it with appropriate evidence drawn from primary and/or secondary sources, cogent explanations, and clear transitions;
• demonstrate understanding and mastery of standard written English as well as stylistic maturity in their own writings;
• demonstrate understanding of the conventions of citing primary and secondary sources;
• move effectively through the stages of the writing process, with careful attention to inquiry and research, drafting, revising, editing, and review;
• write thoughtfully about their own process of composition;
• revise a work to make it suitable for a different audience;
• analyze image as text; and
• evaluate and incorporate reference documents into researched papers.