The Prompt Itself

When I opened each stapled gift from you to me over this holiday season, I was surprised to find so many blank prompts before me. While you were not evaluated on close reading skills, the lack of underlining, circling, and noting patterns of strategies did not assist some writers in organization or analysis. While it may seem to eat away time, taking 4-5 minutes to close read your given prompt will save you time and energy later. The close read, which we practiced in teams on the board on several occasions, allows one to mark the strategies and the multiple examples of evidence throughout the text. A strong close read naturally flows into the thesis, the topic sentences, the evidence, and the analysis necessary to give the prompt justice.

The prompt, based on Harriet Jacobs's narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, provided a brief background of the author and her purpose in writing, her narrative alias of "Linda," the title of the text, and a focus on her attitude towards slavery and the double standard of the slave owner's society. While the prompt featured tone (that would be attitude), a thorough, mature rhetorical analysis would not leave out all the rhetorical strategies that create this tone. Hence, the inclusion of imperative diction and syntax, enumeration, hypophora, juxtaposition, religious motif, anaphora, ethos with the personal anecdote, and pathos were all there in the text for you to identify and analyze. (For all of you overachievers, do note that those were possible options easily identifiable via close read. You would, as always, choose three as your main focus. Some successful essays would then bring in pathos to connect with the hypophora, for instance.)

While this may seem minor, the prompt also clarifies the title and the necessary punctuation for its usage in the essay. We have discussed this several times over the year, and the lack of punctuation, the usage of wrong punctuation, and the dual punctuation of titles creates a mighty distraction in your introductory paragraph. If it is italicized, you underline in your writing; if it is quotation marks, you maintain quotation marks.

Lastly, before I blog about the essay itself, a timed prompt is a fact of life (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGS56qJ0xIw) in AP Lang and your eventual higher level courses. In truth, you need to embrace the timed prompt and make it your friend. Really! If you speak with former AP Lang students, you will hear about how timed prompts made them stronger writers -- once they stopped freaking out about the time element and allowed themselves to write with a combination of their mind and their gut.

If you would like to read more of Harriet Jacobs, check out this link to the full text of Incidents. As you could tell from the prompt selection, her writing evokes great pathos, imagery, and voice that makes her narrative all the more affecting.http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/jacobs/jacobs.html