Ind Rdg Booktalk

AP English
Independent Reading

Booktalk

Rather than writing a paper over this independent reading book, I’d like you to prepare a booktalk.  This will still demand some preparation time and require you to look critically at your novel.  However, you’ll be able to skip the writing time.

You should include all of the following in your presentation:

• Author, title, and year your book was written

• Biographical and historical info on your author and his/her cultural context

• BRIEF plot synopsis

• Analysis of the novel:  what is the POINT of the book (theme/the author’s argument about society, humanity, life, etc.) and what aspects of the author’s writing show that (this is your evidence--discuss symbols, characters, setting, etc.)

• Overview of at least two pieces of professional criticism on the particular text you read or the author’s work in general.  (Do not choose criticism over another text by the same author and try to make it work.) You need professional criticism written by scholars of literature.  This criticism should come ONLY from EBSCO’s Literary Reference Center OR a print source from the MC or Dunn Library.  Sources that are not really criticism will not receive credit!

• Do some research to determine the impact of your particular text and/or author on the literary world.  What later works were inspired by this one?  Which authors/texts inspired your author?  Why is this author/text considered to be great?  (Notice I have not asked for your opinion on whether it’s great.  If you’re reading it, it is.  Instead, I want you to focus on what makes it great.)

The only thing I will collect from you is a works cited page documenting all the sources you used in preparing your presentation, including your independent reading book.  (This should be at least four sources.)  Do it right!  I’m grading for real now and you will not have a chance to re-do it.

Final Exam Study Guide

AP Language & Composition

1^st Semester Exam Study Guide

Rhetoric/Argument Terms

Matching—I’ll pull from key terms in your textbook.

Short Argument Analysis

Multi-choice and short answer—I’ll provide you a NYT article.  You’ll read it and answer questions similar to what you’ve been doing with the NYT this week.

Good Readers & Good Writers

These questions will revolve around the essays by Nabokov, Frost, and Perrine.  Go back and review those essays as well as your reading journals and/or notes.

Connections in Literature

This section will focus on your 2^nd quarter readings.  Firstly, you should be able to not only provide critical interpretations of the literature, but also pinpoint how the author uses the rhetorical model of writing to achieve his/her purpose.  Also, pay attention to the effect of literary devices—not just that they’re there, but how they function in the author’s overall purpose.  In other words, why does the author use them?

Secondly, look at the connections between the pieces of literature.  Pay attention to direct allusions, parody, etc. as well as more subtle connections.  Make sure you understand the value and purpose of connecting to previously written literature.  How does each contemporary author add to his/her purpose and overall effect by using these connections?  Be prepared to compare and contrast the audience, purpose, and meaning of each text.

Everything’s an Argument

This section will test you on your understanding of key concepts from the textbook.  Review your annotations, notes, or reread sections of the textbook with which you’re not totally comfortable.  You’ll also want to review the various kinds of writing we’ve covered this semester as there will be questions pertaining to the various rhetorical strategies in this section of the exam.

AP Multiple Choice

I’ll give you one section of an AP exam (a prose passage and the questions following).

AP Essay Prompt

I’ll give you one essay question for which you should allow yourself 40 minutes.  Remember, it’s important that you pay attention to what the prompt is asking of you and that you respond to all parts of it.

Reading Journal Conference--Written!

This must be submitted to Turnitin by midnight on Thursday.  This is an informal write-up (as if you were actually having a conversation with me) and can be brief but thorough.

1.  Evaluate yourself as a critical reader using Nabokov's standards (have EVIDENCE!!!)

• strengths and weaknesses (which rules are you following and which are you not)
• note improvement from 1st quarter

2.  Discuss your reading of each of this quarter's pairs.  Discuss the connections you see between the works and how critical reading helped you to understand that.

• Jungle and FFN
• Devil stories
• Poe and Gilman

3.  Set your READING goal for next semester.  What can you focus on to continue to improve your critical reading?

Poe and Gilman RJ

AP Lang

Poe and Perkins Gilman Journal

POE

1.    Read the Poe first.  Because you may be familiar with the storyline, make sure you note any surprises or elements of the story you don’t remember.  On your first read:  Follow the general guidelines for your reading journal.  (This may be a good time to go back and look at those. ☺)

2.    On your second read:  Pay careful attention to Poe’s language.  Note the level of vocabulary, the diction choices in establishing and maintaining a mood, the assonance and alliteration and consonance.  (Look up those terms before you begin to be sure you know what you’re looking for. ☺)

3.    Finally, chart the rhythm and pace in the entire story.  Make sure you use specific descriptors here.  Also note the use of loose (sentences that are constructed in a S-V grammatical structure) and periodic (sentences that force the reader to wait until the end for the S-V) sentences.  Make note of what is happening in the plot in relation to the pace and rhythm and sentence types.

PERKINS GILMAN

1.    Read the Gilman.  I strongly urge you to read it at least three times.  Note the obvious

       connections between the two stories, and be very specific.

2.    Note the significant departures from Poe in the Gilman.

3.    What can you say about the Gilman story regarding issues of power and authority?

4.    As the narrator begins to interpret the wallpaper, she becomes wholly taken up with

       figuring it out.  She says that her life “is very much more exciting now than it used to be. 

       You see I have something more to expect, to look forward to, to watch.”  A bit later she

       says, “I don’t want anybody to get that woman out at night but myself.”  Finally, she

       concludes with a confusion of pronouns that merges into a grammatical statement of

       identity:

As soon as it was moonlight and that poor thing began to crawl and shake the pattern, I got up and ran to help her.

              I pulled and she shook, and I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards of that paper.

             What do you make of that?  “I don’t know” is, obviously, an unacceptable answer. 

             Use what we’ve discussed with Nabokov and Perrine to try to come up with a plausible

             answer to what’s going on in this story.

5.    When does the narrator’s descent into madness begin?  How does the answer to

       that question affect your reading of the whole?

COME TO CLASS WITH YOUR RIGHT-HAND SIDE COMPLETED.  KEEP IN MIND THAT YOU MUST DO IT ALL.  IT SHOULD BE YOUR BEST ATTEMPT AT CRITICAL READING AND ANALYSIS.  COME TO CLASS WITH AN IDEA OF WHAT YOU WANT TO DISCUSS IN ORDER TO UNDERSTAND THESE STORIES AND THE CONNECTION BETWEEN THEM BETTER.

Next Ind Rdg Book

World Literature Independent Reading

AP English

For your next independent reading book, your assignment is to expose yourself to some great world literature—an area where you guys are lacking.  To do this, I’d like you to read something in translation.  The objectives:

• Read some of the greatest novels ever written
• Acknowledge the great literature that is neither American nor British
• Continue to read classics that well-read, educated audiences are assumed to have read—which may be alluded to in more recent writing
• Understand the impact that some of these old Russian, French, and German authors had on literature

The list below is not complete, nor is it exclusive.  If you would like to read a book not on the list, you may AS LONG AS:

• It is indeed great literature (not as determined by you, but widely accepted as outstanding writing)
• It was not originally written in English (a.k.a. it has been translated into English)

The Trial—Franz Kafka
The Metamorphosis—Franz Kafka
Crime and Punishment—Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Brothers Karamazov—Dostoyevsky
Notes From the Underground—Dostoyevsky
The Idiot—Dostoyevsky
The Eumenides—Aeschylus
Medea—Euripides
Anna Karenina—Leo Tolstoy
War and Peace—Tolstoy
Madame Bovary—Flaubert
The Cherry Orchard—Chekov
Three Sisters—Chekov
Aeneid—Virgil
All Quiet on the Western Front—Remarque
Crime and Punishment—Dostoyevsky
Divine Comedy:  Inferno—Dante
Don Quixote—Cervantes
Faust—Goethe
Iliad—Homer
The Stranger—Camus
The Plague—Camus
The Prince—Machiavelli
Steppenwolf—Hermann Hesse
Love in the time of Cholera—Gabriel Garcie Marquez
Hedda Gabler—Henrik Ibsen
The Misanthrope—Moliere
Tartuffe—Moliere
The Flowers of Evil—Baudelaire
So Long a Letter—Mariama Ba


Choose a book, sign it up with me, and then begin reading.  You should read it critically, annotating the copy or taking extensive notes.

Ind Rdg Nabokov Essay

AP Language
Independent Reading

We have talked extensively this quarter about Vladimir Nabokov's essay.  We will continue to do so as we use him as a standard with which to gauge our own critical reading skills.  Now, I would like you to assess yourself as a reader and assess the author of your fiction choice as a writer. This should be done only in the context of the Nabokov piece, "Good Readers and Good Writers." 

Objectives:

• demonstrate your understanding of the Nabokov essay
• analyze yourself as a critical reader, identifying your strengths and weaknesses when reading fiction on your own
• continue your work with argumentation and analysis
• demonstrate your ability as a writer: structure, organization, support, and standard English

The Assignment: This paper should have two distinct parts.
In Part One, assess yourself as a reader of your independent reading book using Nabokov's standards of major and minor readers. You must accomplish this in 500-600 words. Remember that you and the novel are the focus here: Do not simply summarize Nabokov's points.  Show how you stack up to his criteria and make sure you evidence to support your claims about yourself!
In Part Two, explain how the author of your book fits all three criteria for Nabokov's major writer.  You should also have evidence for this--quotes from the book that SHOW the author fulfilling Nabokov's roles for great writers. This section should also be 500-600 words.

Things to Consider:  
Part One

• Remember that your audience is me. I have read the Nabokov essay and do not need it explained.  Keep the focus on you and how you read the novel.
• Consider what textual evidence will best support your points. Make sure you choose the best evidence to prove your point.
• Be careful that you aren't relying on one part of the text for all of your paper's support. If your paper refers only to pages 1-100--even if you do a great job with those pages-- I will have to question whether or not you are even familiar with the rest of the book.
• Be specific. Avoid the obvious. Use this question to guide you here: Does this paper explain how I read this novel in relation to Nabokov or could this have been written by a generic student?  Because this section is about how YOU read the book, it should be written in first person.

Part Two

• When you talk about the author as a storyteller, be careful that you don't simply summarize the novel. You need to show HOW the author is good at storytelling--not tell the story he writes.
• Be careful with the enchanter section.  Remember, enchanter doesn't mean magical in a abracadabra kind of way.  It is the artistic brilliance of the author--the way all of the details come together in the end.  Again, don't use plot summary here.  You must prove that the writer is, indeed, an enchanter.
• Because the focus of this section is on the AUTHOR, it should be written in third person--no "I" or "you."

Overall

• Work for good transitions.
• Pay attention to your word choice.
• Audience and purpose should always influence your tone and level of language.
• No one except you should ever see a first (and probably a second) draft of any major writing assignment.  This paper will NOT go through process.  Make sure the paper you turn in is your best work.

Still Sick...

So here's what you guys all need to know.  (I know some of you have heard parts of this already and some of you have heard it all, but I just need to make sure everyone knows everything.)

D2s
Honestly, there's no way I'm going to get them done by Friday now.  I can't even be vertical for more than a few minutes.  I think I'm going to have to get them done over the weekend or early next week which means you won't turn in your final drafts until the very end of the quarter.  Therefore, I will not have time to grade them for 1st quarter and I'm going to shift them to your 2nd quarter grade.  I think this will work out quite nicely for you guys because you already have lots of writing points in 1st quarter (several that have not yet been graded) and you don't have much for 2nd quarter.  This will hopefully balance things out a bit.  I'm sorry about this, but there's not a lot I can do about it at this point. =(

RJ Conferences
A reading journal conference is where you sit down with me for 5-10 minutes (this will happen one day next week while you're reading The Jungle) and talk to me about where you are as a critical reader.  This is the beginning of the year so we're really just beginning this process.  Therefore, I'm not looking for you all to say you're star readers who always follow all of Nabokov's rules. (I won't believe you if you do.)  I am looking for an honest assessment of the rules you follow or at least know you should and the ones you're really not using at all.  These are claims about yourself and you'll need evidence to support them.  Your evidence is your RJ.  Show aspects of it as proof of what you're doing well.  Are you pretty good at noticing details or rhetorical devices? Show examples from your RJ.  Are you rereading?  What were you able to accomplish in your RJ because of that?  If you're not doing something, where is the weakness in your RJ that could have been improved?

After you assess yourself and offer evidence, then I would like one or two specific goals you can set to work on your critical reading during 2nd quarter.  You can't fix everything, so start with what will make the biggest impact (time management, better organization or note-taking, learning more rhetorical devices, better effort to reread, etc.).

How will I grade this?  If you sit down with me, have your RJ, cover what you need to thoroughly but concisely--showing evidence from your completed RJ--you get an A.  If you don't have much in the way of specific evidence, you'll get an A-.   If I have to prompt you to make sure you cover it all or have very little evidence, you'll get some type of B depending on how much prompting you require or how sparse the evidence is.  If you require prompting but can't even answer what I'm asking for OR you clearly don't have a completed RJ OR you just have absolutely no evidence for your claims, you'll end up in the C range.

The Jungle
Ms. Stark will be here today to give a brief explanation of how to use the Nooks.  Use the rest of class to read and work on your RJ.