English II PreAP
Notes: The Art of Styling Sentences
Pattern 1, 1a, 11
Sophomore Survival Guide, Pgs 63, 70
2 nd Six Weeks-
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S V; S V.
Purpose of this pattern:
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Examples from Survival Guide:
1.
2.
Group Example:
1.
S V; (conjunctive adverb), S V.
Purpose of this pattern:
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Examples from Survival Guide:
1.
2.
Group Example:
1.

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S , modifier, V.
S- modifier- V.
S (modifier that whispers) V.
1.
2.
3.
Purpose of this pattern:
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Examples from Survival Guide:
1.(comma)
2. (hyphen)
3. (parentheses)
Group Example:

English II PreAP
Strategies for Mastering the Persuasive Essay
2 nd Six Weeks-
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For AP Language and Composition
On the AP Language exam, the persuasive essay calls for a different set of skills than does the rhetorical analysis essay. Two areas students find difficult are:

Offering credible, appropriate evidence to support their claims
 Understanding the difference between defending, challenging, or qualifying their claims
(Lucky you…as sophomores you won’t have to worry about how to qualify a claim.) 
Goals for Second Six Weeks: 1. Read/Deconstruct past persuasive prompts from the AP exam
2. Read examples of how to defend and challenge a prompt
3. Learn concessions and look at an example response with one
4. Discuss how to come up with appropriate, credible evidence and look at example responses with varied types of evidence
5. Look at the 5 common errors on a persuasive essay & examples of each
6. Plan & Write a persuasive essay
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Past Prompts: Annotate each and try to identify the assigned task. What do all these prompts have in common?
2003: The following passage comes from “The Common Life,” a 1994 essay by American writer Scott Russell
Sanders. Read the passage carefully and write an essay that defends, challenges, or qualifies Sanders’ ideas about the relationship between the individual and society in the United States. Use specific evidence to support your position.
2009: Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents which in prosperous circumstances would have lain dormant.—Horace
Consider this quotation about adversity from the Roman poet Horace. Then write an essay that defends, challenges, or qualifies Horace’s assertion about the role that adversity (financial or political hardship,

English II PreAP 2 nd Six Weeks-
CZ danger, misfortune, etc.) plays in developing a person’s character. Support your answer with appropriate evidence from your reading, observation, or experience.
2014: (Prompt preceded by two passages about the decline of creativity in school aged children and the importance of original thought for solving real-world issues.) Write to your school board explaining what you mean by creativity and arguing for or against the creation of a class in creativity.
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The Difference Between Defend and Challenge, with Example Responses
Assertion: Laws which protect citizens from themselves are justified.
Do you agree with this assertion? Why or why not?
What examples could you use to defend this claim? Challenge?
Defend:
Our forefathers determined that it is the business of the government to provide all that shall affect our “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Democracy works because the people have entrusted that power to their elected officials. It is government’s right and duty to enact laws that best protect and preserve the lives of Americans. Therefore, the government, through our elected officials, has the right to protect citizens and to make judgments regarding how best to protect citizens from themselves. Because society will have to pay (through health and mental care) for a person who harms himself, society has the right to limit a person’s rights when he tries to harm himself.
Challenge:
All human beings are distinct entities, possessing a spirit, soul, and body. The right to make private decisions affecting one’s life is a precious one. Any government, even in its best intentions, never has the right to impose its will on its citizens, even when it proposes to protect them from themselves. According to the values of our country, people should have the “liberty” to choose “life” or “happiness” on their own terms.

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What is a concession?
A concession is an expression of concern for those who do not agree with you. Using concession is a good way to develop your ethos, or your credibility and character, with your audience. Using concession shows your audience that you are a fair-minded person, one who recognizes that any issue has two sides.
Read the paragraph below. Highlight the concession.
Defend or challenge with a concession:
Our forefathers determined that it is the business of the government to provide all that shall affect our “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Democracy works because the people have entrusted that power to their elected officials. It is government’s right and duty to enact laws that best protect and preserve the lives of Americans. Therefore, the government, through our elected officials, has the right to protect citizens and to make judgments regarding how best to protect citizens from themselves. Because society will have to pay (through health and mental care) for a person who harms himself, society has the right to limit a person’s rights when he tries to harm himself. Some might argue that the right to make private decisions affecting one’s life is a precious one, one that government has no right to intrude upon.
They would say that any government never has the right to impose its will on its citizens. Yet society will have to pay (through health and mental care) for a person who harms himself. Therefore, society has the ultimate right and duty to limit a person’s rights when he tries to harm himself.
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What does it mean to offer evidence from your observations, experience, or reading?
Observation Knowledge
Use your knowledge of any subject, such as:

History

Current events
 Science

Technology
 Music
 Sports

Human behavior
 But wait…can I use personal experience? The Chief Reader had this to say about students their own experiences as evidence:

English II PreAP 2 nd Six Weeks-
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“Through extensive reading, discussion, and writing, students will come to recognize a world larger than their own immediate experience. Students need to consider the usefulness of a global view and increase their awareness of the world beyond their own. Students need to recognize that examples drawn from a wider world MAY be stronger than their own personal experiences. If they do use personal experience, the primary purpose should still be rhetorical, not confessional.”
Look again at the 2009 exam persuasive prompt. If you were developing an analogy using your knowledge of how muscle mass is produced, you might create an example from an analogy involving science and your persuasive prompt:
The following is several paragraphs of an essay which earned an “8” on this prompt.
1.
Underline the evidence in the essay.
2.
In the margins, label the kind of specialized knowledge (observations) the student is using. Note also where the student relies on his/her reading for evidence.
An old proverb states, “Character is what you are in the dark,” and it is in the darkest of times that who we are sometimes shines through. Nelson Mandela,
Stephen Hawking, Lance Armstrong; our society loves to hear of a man who triumphs through adversity. But would these talents and achievement have arisen anyway—or more easily—if there had been no adversity? Possibly, but I agree with the Roman poet Horace in that adversity has a way of rousing talent from slumber. Adversity can stimulate, force, and sharpen a person in ways prosperity cannot—there is, then, value in hardship.
Biology teaches us that a stimulus will elicit a response. Newton taught us that one force provokes another, in opposition to it. While various life experiences might “elicit” a response, adversity may analogize better with physics than biology. It does not simply request a response—it demands it. Otherwise the adversity will never be lifted and hardship will prevail. Hamlet’s tragic flaw was indecision, and
Shakespeare no doubt understood that those in adversity must learn to be capable of a response if they are to survive.

English II PreAP 2 nd Six Weeks-
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Survival, of course, is a powerful motivator. Evolution runs on it; in this sense every organism on the planet works due to adversity. This survival imperative is so powerful, it has been used beyond the biological creatures it is hardcoded into. Computers now make use of genetic algorithms, where competing solutions to a problem—say, the correct shape of an aircraft wing—are selected, mathematically “bred,” and mutated into a new generation.
Adversity, ti seems, elicits talents in more than humans.
Prosperity, on the other hand, does not always engender growth. The prosperous man has no pressing needs or emergencies that require him to develop talents to counter.
Fahrenheit 451 provides a literary example. The people in this “utopia” are always fed. They possess machines to erase unhappy and suicidal thoughts. But there is no growth. When the protagonist chooses to leave this society behind and violate its rules, he claims a life including the possibility of real love, family, books, free thought, the pursuit of knowledge, and much more.
In fiction, a character often ends a story realizing far more than he did when he began. The conflicts and resolutions he has been through have forced it on him. Character development is not merely a literary construct—it exists in life. We cannot live and we cannot grow living in a perfect world, free of all troubles; we must have ideals to grow towards, revealed through the valuable lessons that adversity provides.
Common Problems in Persuasive Writing
Common errors in writing this essay:
1.
Not understanding the task or directions
2.
Merely paraphrasing the passage
3.
Not taking a definite stand
4.
Using inappropriate or weak evidence to support your position
5.
Writing a stylistic analysis of the passage instead of a persuasive essay
Read the sample prompt from the 2003 exam. Deconstruct the prompt to identify the question being asked in this prompt.
*2003
The following passage comes from “The Common Life,” a 1994 essay by the American writer Scott Russell
Sanders. Read the passage carefully and then write an essay that defends, challenges, or qualifies Sanders’ ideas about the relationship between the individual and society in the United States. Use specific evidence to support your position.
A woman who recently moved from Los Angeles to Bloomington [Indiana] told me that she would not be able to stay here long, because she was already beginning to recognize people in the grocery stores, on the sidewalks, in the library. Being surrounded by familiar faces made her nervous, after years in a city where she could range about anonymously. Every traveler knows the sense of liberation that comes from journeying to a place where nobody expects anything of you. Everyone who has gone to college knows the exhilaration of slipping away from the watchful eyes of Mom and Dad. We all need seasons of withdrawal from responsibility. But if we make a career of

English II PreAP 2 nd Six Weeks-
CZ being unaccountable, we have lost something essential in our humanity, and we may well become a burden or a threat to those around us. A community can support a number of people who are just passing through, or who care about no one’s needs other than their own; the great the proportion of such people, however, the more vulnerable the community, until eventually it breaks down…Taking part in the common life means dwelling in a web of relationships, the many threads tugging at you while also holding you upright.
Read through the three following examples and decide which of the common errors fits.
1.
Not understanding the task or directions
2.
Merely paraphrasing the passage
3.
Not taking a definite stand
4.
Using inappropriate or weak evidence to support your position
5.
Writing a stylistic analysis of the passage instead of a persuasive essay
1.
For example, when people get caught doing something wrong they don’t want to admit to their mistakes, they sometimes think of a lie, which is a defense mechanism people use when in trouble. Who hasn’t lied at some time in their lives? The guilt will haunt he lady in the passage who moved to Bloomington, tearing up everything in her life from inside then out.
2.
Sanders describes the relationship between the individual and society as a contrast. The individual is nervous around a too-familiar society. A society feels threatened by a great number of individuals that are unfamiliar.
In a big city, most people become accustomed to unknown people because of the large population. However, in a small town where everybody knows everybody else, a newcomer might be seen as a threat to their way of life. In a small community, most people has their familiar routines. For the traveler, though, it is still a new opportunity for the community. The unknown traveler may be thought of as an alteration to their everyday routine.
3.
Sanders was accurate when he said the many threads tug, yet hold one another upright. His metaphor identified individual lives as threads. The metaphor makes the reader reflect to a special blanket or person who brought them comfort, evoking emotional reactions.
4.
In this passage, Sanders writes about the relationship between the individual and society. He talks about a lady who moved from Los Angeles to Bloomington, Indiana. She says she would not be able to stay long because she was already beginning to recognize people. Sanders writes that the lady gets nervous when she is recognized. She liked not being known and not having to get involved in society. Sanders says that a couple of people like this help society run, but if there were too many, society would collapse. Society depends on some people to interact so that it can keep going.
5.
A small town culture is often seen as boring and old-fashioned, but it is just as important to our nation as any of the modern big cities. In New York City people have that opportunity to wander the city anonymously.
Perhaps that is the reason why crime rates are so much higher in large cities. People are far less likely to behave badly if people they know are watching them. This constant concern of others judging you is perhaps more beneficial than some may have you believe. It can get quite nerve-wracking to always be under watch, but those that watch you also come to your aid in times of need. For example, when you go out of town you can ask your ever-watchful neighbors to keep an eye on your house for peace of mind. If everyone went around with a total disregard for others, society would break down and the world would become a terrible and primal place.