Quizzes, exams, and flashcards about English Language and Composition: Section I 1 — what the prose is doing.
← AP
Not a literature course. A course in how non-fiction prose does its work, and an exam in which more than half the score is three essays written in two hours and a quarter.
The three essays are fixed in kind, every year:
Between what a text says and what it does. A rhetorical analysis essay that summarises a passage beautifully scores badly, because summary is not analysis: the question is why this writer, addressing this audience, made these choices — and what those choices accomplish.
Apply that to the multiple-choice section too. The reading questions are not comprehension questions. They ask what a sentence is doing in the argument, whom the passage seems to address, what the effect of a particular move is. If your answer to "why is this sentence here" is a paraphrase of the sentence, it is not yet an answer.
Read the rubrics. Each essay is scored out of six on three rows: a thesis point, four points for evidence and commentary, and one point for sophistication. Knowing that commentary carries far more weight than evidence changes how you write — most weak essays are long on quotation and short on saying what the quotation shows.
The multiple-choice half, which is 45% of the score and the half a question bank can genuinely train: the terminology of rhetoric used precisely, the reading of a passage for its moves rather than its content, and the revision questions that ask which sentence best accomplishes a stated purpose in a draft.
They do not simulate the essays, and nothing that is not an essay can. But they train the perception the essays depend on. A student who can name what a concession is doing in someone else's paragraph writes a better rhetorical analysis than one who cannot, and a student who has never noticed the move writes summary.
