Hello Students and Parents! Welcome to an exciting year of language and composition study and exploration. This really is a class that explores what is around us everyday, the messages and forms of communication that reach us by casual conversation, newspapers, television, the Internet, billboards, novels, textbooks, and various other vehicles. The goal of any first-year college composition course is to expose students to different types of contemporary texts and prepare them for college-level reading, critical thinking and writing. Essentially, AP Language and Composition is designed as a college-inspired composition course.

Students will study key expository writing styles in extended texts, including memoirs and biographies. Students will also study other supplements such as professional essays, speeches, short stories, novels, and articles with a critical eye for rhetorical strategies and close reading analysis for contemporary themes. This course will give students the tools to identify expository and persuasive prose in texts by the rhetorical devices the authors use, while analyzing audience and purpose. In conjunction, students will learn how to develop and communicate their own synthesis of ideas presented by other writers, realizing that not everything in print is absolute or correct. They will further their understanding of the reader/writer relationship by sharpening their active reading skills through pre-reading, background research and critical inquiry. They will compare rhetorical strategies to recognize the more effective forms of written expression, and they will learn through writing and evaluating their own texts.

Buckle your seat belts...here we go!