Into the Wild

Was it this lobster? This one? Or this one?   I hate to say this, but the answer is none of the above. It is this iconic one:    You say be asking yourself, "What in the world is this?" but I assure you, it does have something to do with synthesis. I'll get to it. Synthesis reminds me of a distant relative to the DBQ of AP History. Given around seven documents, we are told to answer a prompt and use the sources to back up our argument. The synthetic prompt can even be answered without the sources (I did that and it was not very fun.), but for the purpose of this blog, I'm not going to focus on that aspect. However, I am going to concentrate on what I learned from writing a synthesis. (C) The first one I ever wrote was on the mock exam where I received a 9. A NINE! I couldn't believe it and I was impressed that I could do so well on something I hadn't really learned before. But, once McMahon read it, she gav

Ah, multiple choice. Where do I begin?   I'll start here: I couldn't figure out what strategy would help me with this excruciating topic. Earplugs? Not really my thing. Blocking my ears? Didn't work. No annotating? A bit strange and restraining. Reading each line with my finger on the words? NOPE. Not reading the passage? Freaked me out. As you can tell, I felt lost. OK, maybe a lot lost.   However, once I read the passage beforehand, understood all the words, and comprehended the purpose the night before, my head was back on straight. I realized that I needed to improve my reading comprehension skills before I even made it to the multiple choice questions. When I felt really lost or confused, it was no bueno. By increasing my skill set I was able to understand the purpose of the passage, which was my main trouble. By concentrating on the passage without a time restraint at home before I even had the questions, I could take a moment

Argument was the next essay on the agenda. Halfway through the year, we changed gears and moved on from RA to focus on the opinion-based question. It was a little rushed at the beginning with the mock exam quickly approaching, so argument was smushed into a short week or two before it and then was continued after. At first, trying to answer the actual prompt with a valid response felt like this: But as time went on, I figured it out little by little, just like the RA and now it feels like this: When writing an argument, I have to be strong, clever, and clear about my position to persuade the reader to be on my side. I want the reader to realize that I have a valid point that makes them think about their own beliefs. My writing has to be powerful enough to influence their opinion on the subject matter at hand so that they are persuaded that I am right. Even with a qualifier, I have to make my viewpoint clear and support it with appropriate evidence or argument will be u

Walking into AP Lang on the first day, I’m not going to lie, I was nervous. I knew that there were going to be high expectations and a ton of work involved, but the class would help me to greatly improve my writing ability and SAT score. However, those weren’t the only things Lang taught me over the year. First and foremost, the school year began with the dreaded Rhetorical Analysis. In order to start that, we needed to learn how to annotate. The first week of school, I was exposed to the poem "Digging" by Seamus Heaney. I wrote down what I thought I knew, but to no surprise, it barely scratched the surface of what annotations should be. Over time, I eventually learned how to annotate, but that didn't immediately translate to a perfect RA. Writing my first RA was an interesting experience, to say the least. I annotated that piece as much as I could and to my best ability, scribbling down every rhetorical device I could find. By the time I finished annotating, I was al