Course Description

The Advanced Placement Literature and Composition course is designed to teach high school students to thoroughly analyze and emulate works of “literary merit” at the college level through extensive reading, writing, and discussion-based initiatives. As such, we will talk every day about some vital aspect of literature as it relates to writing, including: rhetorical devices, disposition or structure, and style (diction, syntax, figurative language, mechanics). The kinds of writings in this course are varied but include writing to understand, writing to explain, and writing to evaluate. All critical writing asks that you evaluate the effectiveness of a literary piece, but to be an effective evaluator, one must understand and explain. The essence of literary study is the combination of these three approaches to writing. 

This class will function as a true workshop; therefore, you will write a good deal, and you will revise certain pieces of your writing into polished final drafts. You will also produce a final writing portfolio. In the process of these workshops, you will be exposed to your conscious choice of diction and the appropriate use of words, your ability to create varied and effective syntactic structures, your capacity for coherence and illustrative details, and, overall, your ability to combine rhetorical processes into an effective whole. Our exploration of chosen literary works will serve to develop these competencies in various modes of writing. What I expect most of all from our class is hard work and careful reading on the part of the individual and ready, mature, insightful discussion on the part of the class.

READING: The most important requirement for this course is that students read every assignment and that they read it with care and timeliness. 

Continued in course syllabus (see Syllabus at right).