The Course (College Board AP® English Language & Composition): Revision Note

What is AP Lang?

AP Lang is a college-level course in rhetoric and composition:

• Rhetoric is the study of the choices writers make to persuade an audience in a particular situation

• Composition is the writing of your own arguments

You will also learn to evaluate, synthesize and cite sources to support your own arguments. There are no prerequisite for AP Lang, but you should be able to read college-level texts and express your ideas clearly in writing.

Throughout the course, you will follow the same pattern:

• Read and analyze an argument written by someone else

• Work out what makes it convincing or confusing, engaging or dull

• Write an argument of your own that uses the choices you have studied

Most of the texts you will read are short pieces of nonfiction, such as speeches, essays, articles and letters. Some of the sources you will work with, especially in the synthesis essay, are visual, such as charts, graphs and images. See How to analyze visual sources in FRQ 1: The Synthesis Essay.

Grammar is not a main focus of the course. Unit 7 includes some focused work on punctuation, but otherwise your writing will improve through reading, analyzing and imitating effective arguments. On the exam, small grammatical errors of the kind that happen in timed writing will not lower your score. Only errors so frequent that they interfere with communication will.

The Big Ideas in AP Lang

The course is built around four Big Ideas. These are threads that run through every unit, and each one comes with an Enduring Understanding: a core principle you will return to again and again:

The Big Ideas spiral through the course. Each unit focuses on two or three of them, and Unit 9 brings all four together for the exam.

The skills in AP Lang

AP Lang skills come in pairs. Each Big Idea has a reading skill category and a writing skill category. The reading category asks you to analyze another writer's argument. The writing category asks you to make the same kind of choice in your own argument. This gives eight skill categories:

Each skill category is broken down into specific skills, labeled with a number and a letter, such as 1.A or 4.C. There are 22 skills in total. The skills are taught through Essential Knowledge statements, which are labeled with their Big Idea code, such as RHS-1.A.

You do not need to memorize these codes. They show you exactly which part of the course a study guide covers, and each unit's Overview study guide lists the skills and Essential Knowledge for that unit.

How the course is organized

The course is divided into nine units. The College Board does not give the units fixed titles. Teachers choose a theme for each one, so your class may use different unit names from the ones below. Units 1 to 8 build your reading and writing skills step by step, and Unit 9 prepares you for the exam:

How each unit works

Every unit follows the same structure, so you always know where to find what you need:

• An Overview study guide, which sets out the unit's Big Ideas, skills, Essential Knowledge and key terms

• Topic study guides, most of which include worked examples, common mistakes, frequently asked questions and a glossary

• A Summary study guide, which recaps the key takeaway from each study guide and lists what you should now be able to do

Within each topic study guide, you will usually work through the same sequence. You will first learn to identify a choice, then explain how it works in a real text, and finally practice using it in your own writing.

Where you will begin

You will begin with Unit 1: Foundations of Rhetoric, which introduces the rhetorical situation. Every later unit builds on this idea. Before you can explain why a writer makes a choice, you need to understand whom they are writing for, why they are writing and in what context.

Before you start Unit 1, read The Exam study guide, so you know what the course is preparing you for.

Key terms and glossary

These are the terms you will meet most often across the course. The same definitions are used in every study guide:

• Appeal: a method of influencing an audience's judgment, emotions, values or reasoning

• Audience: the person or group a writer addresses or seeks to influence

• Claim: a statement that presents a writer's position and requires proof or defense

• Commentary: explanation that shows how evidence supports a reason, how the reason supports the thesis and why the evidence matters

• Comparison: a stylistic choice that explains or presents one idea in relation to another

• Context: the time, place, occasion and broader circumstances that surround a text

• Contextualization: necessary background that helps the audience understand the issue and claim

• Counterargument: a position, reason or interpretation that challenges some part of a writer's argument

• Credibility: the degree to which a writer or source deserves confidence for a particular claim

• Defensible thesis: a main claim that responds to the prompt and can be supported with reasoning and evidence

• Diction: a writer's word choice

• Evidence: information used to support a claim or reason

• Exigence: the issue, event, problem or situation that prompts a writer to create a text

• Limitation: a boundary on what a source or its evidence can establish

• Line of reasoning: the logical progression of reasons, evidence and commentary that explains how the thesis is supported

• Message: the central idea a writer communicates

• MSCAPE: the rhetorical situation tool that considers Message, Subject, Context, Audience, Purpose and Exigence

• Parallel structure: the use of similar grammatical patterns to show that ideas are related or balanced

• Paraphrase: an accurate restatement of a source's idea in your own words and sentence structure

• Perspective: the lens through which a source approaches an issue, shaped by its background, experience, expertise, interests or values

• Position: the claim or stance a source takes on an issue

• Purpose: what a writer hopes to accomplish

• Qualification: a condition, limitation or exception that makes a claim more precise

• Reason: an explanation of why a claim or thesis is valid

• Refinement: making a claim or perspective more precise while keeping its central position

• Rhetorical choice: a decision a writer makes to influence an audience and achieve a purpose

• Rhetorical situation: the circumstances that shape a text, including the exigence, audience, writer, purpose, context and message

• Scope: the range of situations, groups or conditions to which a claim or its evidence can reasonably apply

• Shift: a meaningful change in tone, perspective, focus or rhetorical approach

• Style: the pattern created by a writer's word choice, syntax, comparisons, conventions and tone

• Summary: a condensed statement of a source's main ideas

• Supporting claim: a claim that develops one part of the thesis and contributes to its defense

• Syntax: the arrangement of words, phrases and clauses in a sentence

• Synthesis: the process of considering, explaining and integrating ideas from multiple sources into your own argument

• Thesis: the main, overarching claim a writer seeks to defend or prove by using reasoning supported by evidence

• Tone: the writer's attitude toward the subject, audience or situation

• Topic sentence: a sentence that states the main claim or reason developed in a body paragraph

• Transition: a word, phrase, clause, sentence or paragraph that shows the relationship between ideas

• Word choice: the specific words a writer selects to communicate meaning, tone and perspective