Paramus High School
Paramus, New Jersey
DEPARTMENT:
English
JANUARY 2004
COURSE: AP Language & Composition
LEVEL: 11,12, Half year, 2½ Credits
PREREQUISITE: Successful completion of English 9 & 10 Honors
I.
COURSE DESCRIPTION
Advanced Placement Language and Composition will be scheduled as a year-long, threeday per week honors elective course for three credits. It will be open to junior and seniors. The
AP Language and Composition course is intended by the College Board to be very similar to a
college freshman course in rhetoric and composition. If students take this course and successfully
pass the AP examination, they should be excused from the required freshman composition course
in most colleges. Like the college freshman writing course, the purpose of Language and
Composition is to enable students to write effectively in their college courses across the
curriculum and in their subsequent personal and professional lives. The course will emphasize
the expository, analytical and argumentative writing that forms the basis of academic and
professional communication. Like the college course, its purpose is to enable students to read and
write prose mature enough in conception, development, and language to communicate effectively
with adult readers on issues of some intellectual importance.
In addition, the freshman composition course should develop the student’s mastery of
his/her own writing processes, particularly their ability to reconsider and revise their work. The
AP Language and Composition course will also give students the experience of writing several
essays that are at least 1,000 words in length and that are taken through a process of drafting,
response by peers and/or teacher, and substantive revision. The experience of writing such
extended essays is now generally seen as the essence of the college course.
II.
COURSE OBJECTIVES
ENGISH CORE CURRICULUM CONTENT STANDARDS:
3.1F1-3,G1,6-11,H2,3.2A1-7,B1-5,8-9,11-12,C1-6,D1-3, 5,7-8,3.3A1-4,B1-7,C1-2.
An AP course in Language and Composition may be organized in a variety of ways. For
example, it might be structured by a successive study of the various purposes or modes of
discourse (narration, exposition, argumentation, and so on), by a historical overview of prose
and its language, or by a focus on a variety of works related to a particular topic, period, or
theme. As students read closely many kinds of prose, they become increasingly aware of how
authors from different periods and disciplines suit their rhetorical choices to particular aims, and
they develop some of the same flexibility themselves.
The Language and Composition course assumes that its students already command
standard English grammar. Throughout the course, emphasis should be placed on helping
students develop stylistic maturity, which is characterized by the following: a wide ranging
vocabulary used with denotative accuracy and respect for connotation; variety in sentence
structures, including appropriate use of subordination and coordination; logical organization,
enhanced by specific techniques of coherence such as repetition, transitions, and emphasis;
rhetorical effectiveness, including controlling tone, maintaining a consistent voice, and achieving
emphasis through parallelism and antithesis. As they read, the students are brought to an
awareness of the different stylistic effects created by different syntactical choices and by different
levels of diction. Since these differences can often be observed most easily in fiction and poetry,
literature clearly has a place in a Language and Composition course. The main purpose for
including literature, however, should be to facilitate this scrutiny of linguistic and rhetorical
choices, not primarily to study literary elements like the conventions of the sonnet, for example,
or the subtleties of point of view. A focus on the analysis of language itself might be a profitable
theme for the course as a whole.
III.
EVALUATION PROCEDURES:
The three-hour examination gives students the opportunity to demonstrate their mastery
of the skills and abilities described above.
The AP Examination in Language and Composition employs multiple-choice questions;
these test the student's skills in analyzing the rhetoric of prose passages. The students are also
asked, however, to demonstrate their skill in composition directly by writing several essays of
varying lengths in various rhetorical modes. Although the skills tested in the examination
remain essentially the same from year to year, each year's examination is composed of new
questions. The essay part of the examination is scored under standardized procedures by college
and AP English teachers.
IV.
SUGGESTED MATERIALS:
The following authors and works indicate the possible ranges and quality of reading in a
Language and Composition course:
Autobiographers and Diarists:
Maya Angelo, James Boswell, Charles Dana, Thomas De Quincay, Frederick Douglass,
Lillian Hellman, Helen Keeler, Maxine Hong Kingston, T. E. Lawrence, John Henry
Newman, Samuel Pepys, Richard Rodriguez, Richard Wright, Malcolm X,
AnziaYezierska
Biographers and History Writers:
Walter Jackson Bate, James Boswell, Thomas Carlyle, Winston Churchill, Leon Edel,
Richard Ellmann, Antonia Fraser, Edward Gibbon, Gerda Lerner, Thomas Macaulay,
Samuel Eliot Morison, Francis Parkman, Arthur M. Schlesinger, George Trevelyan,
Barbara Tuchman
Critics:
Michael Arlen, Matthew Arnold, Kenneth Clark, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, Arlene Croce, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Hazlitt,
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Samuel Johnson, Pauline Kael, Joyce Carol Oates, Walter Pater,
John Ruskin, George Santayana, George Bernard Shaw, Susan
Sontag, Oscar Wilde, Edmund Wilson
Essayists and Fiction Writers:
Joseph Addison, James Agee, Margaret Atwood, Francis Bacon,
James Baldwin, G. K. Chesterton, Joan Didion, Paul Fussell, Nadine Gordimer,
Zora Neale Hurston, Charles Lamb, Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy, Scott
Momaday, Montaigne, V. S. Naipaul, Tillie Olsen, George Orwell, Cynthia Ozick,
Adrienne Rich, Richard Steele, John Updike, Alice Walker, Eudora Welty, E. B.
White, Virginia Woolf
Journalists:
Roger Angell, Elizabeth Drew, Nora Ephron, M. F. K. Fisher,
Frances Fitzgerald, Janet Flanner (Genêt), Ellen Goodman, Andy
Logan, John McPhee, H. L. Mencken, Jan Morris, Red Smith,
Lincoln Steffens, Paul Theroux, Calvin Trillin, Tom Wolfe
Political Writers:
Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, William F. Buckley, Jean de Crèvecoeur, W. E. B.
DuBois, Margaret Fuller, John K. Galbraith, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Thomas Hobbes,
Thomas Jefferson, George Kennan, Martin Luther King, Lewis H. Lapham, John Locke,
Niccolò Machiavelli, John Stuart Mill, John Milton, Thomas More, Olive Schreiner,
Jonathan Swift, Alexis de Tocqueville, Gore Vidal, Mary Wollstonecraft
Science and Nature Writers:
Jacob Bronowski, Annie Dillard, Gretel Ehrlich, Loren Eiseley, Clifford Geertz, Stephen
Jay Gould, Peter Matthiessen, Margaret Mead, Carl Sagan, Lewis Thomas
Useful Works on Composition:
Baker, Sheridan. The Practical Stylist. 7th ed. New York: HarperCollins, 1989.
Barzun, Jacques. Simple and Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers. New
York: HarperCollins, 1985.
Berthoff, Ann E. The Making of Meaning: Metaphors, Models, and Maxims
for Writing Teachers. Portsmouth, N. H.: Boynton Cook, 1981.
Corbett, Edward J. Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student. 3rd
ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Duncan, Robert. Writing, Writing. Portland, Oreg.: Trask House
Books, 1971.
Elbow, Peter. Writing Without Teachers. New York: Oxford University Press,
1975.
Emig, Janet. The Web of Meaning: Essays on Writing, Teaching,
Learning, and Thinking. Portsmouth, N.H.: Boynton Cook, 1983.
Gibson, Walker. Persona: A Style Study for Readers and Writers.
New York: Random House, 1969.
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Heath, Shirley B. Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in
Communities and Classrooms. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Lanham, Richard. Analyzing Prose. New York: Scribner's, 1983.
Lindemann, Erika. A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers. 2nd ed. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Macrorie, Ken. Telling Writing. 4th ed. Portsmouth, N.H.: Boynton Cook,
1985.
Murray, Donald M. Learning by Teaching: Selected Articles on
Writing and Teaching. Portsmouth, N. H.: Boynton Cook, 1982.
Shaughnessy, Mina P. Errors and Expectations: A Guide for the
Teacher of Basic Writing. New York: Oxford University Press,
1977.
Strunk, W., Jr. and White, E. B. The Elements of Style. 3rd ed. New
York: Macmillan, 1978.
Summerfield, Geoffery and Fishman, Judith. Texts and Contexts.
New York: McGraw-Hill, 1986.
Tate, Gary, ed. Teaching Composition: Twelve Bibliographical
Essays. 2nd rev. ed. Fort Worth, Tex.: Texas Christian University
Press,1987.
Trimble, John R. Writing with Style: Conversations on the Art of
Writing. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975.
Williams, Joseph. Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace. 3rd ed.
Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman and Co., 1989.
Zinsser, William K. On Writing Well: An Informal Guide to Writing
Nonfiction. 3rd ed. New York: HarperCollins, 1985.
Literary Handbooks:
Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 5th ed. New York:
Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1988.
Holman, Hugh C. Handbook of Literature. 5th ed. New York:
Macmillan, 1986.
Lanham, Richard A. A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms: A Guide for
Students of English Literature. Berkeley, Calif.: University of
California Press, 1968.
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