Why take AP Lang?

           When I first heard about AP Lang last year during class registration I immediately thought people must be either completely crazy, or have way too much time on their hands. I rejected the idea right away. After giving some thought, and looking into my schedule and future ambitions (college) I started to consider what good and bad would come out of taking this class. I came to the conclusion that not only will this class help prepare me for college and boost my GPA, but it will also help me in ways I would have never imagined.

            A common myth about AP Lang is that it is a heap-load of homework, reading, and huge essays. This is not true. Yes, there is a lot of reading involved, but the majority of the reading isn’t homework, but reading in class. We read a variety of essays in this class, some long, and some short, from different authors and writing styles. Although many are boring, there are many interesting essays as well.

            Many people also complain about the analysis or synthesis essays we have to write in AP Lang. The essays may sound hard, but come pretty easy when you take the right notes on our readings, and properly analyze. Each term we have a few class discussions over excerpts we read in or out of class. These discussions help a lot to maybe catch things that you didn’t notice in the excerpts, but your classmates did, and also to ask questions you may have to clear up before writing your own analysis essay. I think this is the thing that has helped me most in this class by preparing me for reading college level essays, and learning how to construct my own advanced analysis essay.

            As with every other AP class, there is, of course, the dreaded AP test at the end of the school year. Although I haven’t taken the exam yet, I have heard that it is extremely challenging to many people. This could be a potential “turn-off” to people considering this class, but if you look at the big picture of the things that you will learn from this class, and also use in college, it is worth taking the class.

            I have learned a lot of writing, analyzing, and synthesizing techniques, as well as other things not involved in this class. One of these is time management. I have had to learn how to manage our homework assignments in this class, along with each term’s reading pages and blogging numbers, and also other class work. I would highly suggest anyone with college aspirations to take this course.