1441 Advanced Placement (AP) Composition

Prerequisite: Honors English 10, 11, or AP Literature, Teacher Recommendation

The Advanced Placement Composition course cultivates the reading and writing skills that students need for college success and for intellectually responsible civic engagement. This course guides students in becoming curious, critical, and responsive readers to diverse texts, and becoming flexible, responsive writers of texts addressed to diverse audiences for diverse purposes. The reading and writing students conduct in the course will deepen and expand their understanding of how written language functions rhetorically: to communicate writers’ intentions and elicit readers’ responses to particular situations. The course cultivates the rhetorical understanding and use of written language by directing students’ attention to writer/reader interactions in their reading and writing of various formal and informal genres (such as memos, letters, advertisements, political satires, personal narratives, scientific arguments, cultural critiques, and research reports). Reading and writing activities in the course also deepen students’ knowledge and control of formal conventions of written language (such as vocabulary, diction, syntax, spelling, punctuation, paragraphing, and genre). Students who successfully pass the Advanced Placement examination may be awarded college credit in English upon entrance to most universities.