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= media type="googlecalendar" key="qkkrl2j5nh0us59vcn9v0ecm4c%40group.calendar.google.com" ARG0="&ctz=America/New_York" height="600" width="800" align="center"   AP Language & Composition 2010-2011 __Course Description: __

AP Language and Composition emphasizes the skilled reading of prose written in a variety of periods, disciplines, and rhetorical contexts, and in your becoming skilled writers who compose for a variety of purposes. While the course is topically focused on American literature, the course demands an awareness of the interactions among a writer’s purposes, audience expectations, and subjects as well as the way generic conventions and the resources of language contribute to effectiveness in writing. In addition, the use of informed research materials and the ability to synthesize varied sources are integral parts of the course.

The course’s ultimate purpose is to enable you to read complex texts with nuanced understanding and to write prose of sufficient richness and complexity to communicate effectively with mature readers. We will study a variety of prose styles from many disciplines and historical periods. Writing for this course will be both formal and informal, will require you to take stylistic, interpretative and structural risks. As we study the language and rhetorical conventions of American fiction, poetry, drama and essays, your own writing will require you to purposefully use a variety of diction and sentence structure, to enhance organization with rhetorical techniques to balance general and specific illustrative detail, and to control tone appropriate to audience and purpose.