AP Language and Composition summer reading

AP LANGUAGE AND COMPOSITION 

SUMMER READING ASSIGNMENT

Welcome to AP Lang and Comp, and congratulations on taking your first AP English class! Your junior year may be the most challenging year of your high school career, but it is also the most rewarding as it holds such tremendous opportunities for personal and academic growth. While we do a great deal of reading and discussing in this course, AP Lang is primarily a composition course, and with your commitment, the work we will do in this course will help you become a more skilled, more confident writer by the end of this year. This course will also prepare you to take the AP English Language and Composition exam. A successful score on this exam can earn you three hours of (free!) college credit. 

Assignment: Reading and Writing Tasks

A major focus of our work in AP Lang involves examining the choices authors make in conveying their messages. We would like you to read your chosen nonfiction book (see below for options) with this concept in mind. You may purchase or borrow your copy of the book you’ve chosen (but do recognize that this choice of book will need to be accessible for a large chunk of the first quarter so that you can write a formal out-of-class essay on it), and you may read a physical or digital copy of it. 

Choose one title from the books listed on this site!

Reading Task:

With any nonfiction book, the author’s message is often more apparent than it is in fiction. In fact, you’ll often get a sense for what the book is about and why the author wrote it after you’ve read the preface, intro, and/or the back cover! As you read the book you’ve chosen, consider the moves/choices the author is making to convince you (the reader) of his or her main message. What facts are presented? Are there emotional accounts of the impact of this issue? Does the writer’s style make his or her message particularly engaging? 

Take notes on the writer’s moves/choices and identify three of the most important passages (short sections of the book that are about one paragraph to one page in length) that convey the book’s central idea or theme. Choose one passage near the beginning of the book, one passage near the middle, and one passage near the end; each passage should help convey the significant central idea communicated in the text as a whole. They can be passages of description/narration, dialogue, or a combination of the two. Since the book’s message unfolds as you read, it will be important for you to take notes in some way to help you identify key moments in the book. We suggest you use Post-it notes or digital annotations to help you identify important passages you may use in the culminating writing assignment described below.

Writing Task:

After writing a brief summary for the whole book, you will write an explanation for each of the 3 chosen passages that gives context, identifies the book’s central theme/message, and explains how the important passage powerfully conveys that central idea or theme (analysis). This writing assignment will be a topic of discussion when we return to school; therefore, the assignment is due by the beginning of class on Wednesday, August 20. Make a copy of this template, and type out your assignment on it so that you can copy it onto an official Schoology assignment once school starts. You must also bring your book to class (electronic or paper copies) for when we discuss our books.

While you do not need to purchase the book, we will be using it to write an essay during the first quarter, so you will need to access it and your annotations for that essay in the future. Be sure to get the regular editions (not the Young Readers editions) of the books!

Need a book? A limited number of copies of each title are available for checkout in the textbook store near the library entrance. If you would like one, please check one out ASAP because it is difficult to obtain one during the summer!