AP Language & Composition

Summer Reading ASSIGNMENT

The AP English Language and Composition course aligns with an introductory college-level rhetoric and writing curriculum and utilizes American literature as its foundation. The course focuses on developing and revising evidence-based, analytic, and argumentative writing and the rhetorical analysis of texts. Students discuss writers' decisions as they compose and revise by evaluating, synthesizing, and citing research to support their arguments. Instruction will be based on fiction, nonfiction, and visual texts from various historical periods, from the earliest Native Americans to the contemporary United States. There is an emphasis on understanding and appreciating the many and varied American perspectives and the experiences that shaped this nation and formed its people. To initiate the study of these elements, students will be required to read Educated, by Tara Westover, and The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger, for their summer reading assignment.

For each book, students will be required to complete a dialectical journal. Please read the instructions below very carefully before beginning. Journals should be typed using the provided template and ready to turn in on the first day of school.

Assignment Instructions

Blank Dialectical Journal Template

Purchasing the Book

For this assignment, physical copies of Educated and The Catcher in the Rye are preferred. While links to Amazon are provided below, books can be purchased at any retailer that carries the same ISBNs.

Educated

Tara Westover

Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, Tara Westover was 17 the first time she set foot in a classroom. Her family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education and no one to intervene when one of Tara’s older brothers became violent. When another brother got himself into college, Tara decided to try a new kind of life. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge University. Only then would she wonder if she’d traveled too far, if there was still a way home.

Source: Amazon.com

Purchase here!

The Catcher in the Rye

J.D. Salinger

The hero-narrator of The Catcher in the Rye is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days, grappling with feelings of loneliness, grief, and alienation. His search for something genuine in a world that feels insincere and superficial remains urgent and unmistakably modern.

In Holden's comic, cutting, and painfully sincere voice, readers discover a comradeship and understanding as they recognize the ache of being lost, and the impulse toward rebellion that comes with the passage into adulthood. The Catcher in the Rye resonates deeply and personally for every new reader.