AP Language and Composition
Summer Homework, 2019
Welcome to Mr.
Kline’s AP Language and Composition! I’m very excited about next year and I’m
looking forward to meeting all of you. As with most AP classes, our work begins
this summer. If you have any questions, I frequently check my e-mail over the
summer. I encourage you to reach out for help!
A note on e-mail etiquette: Remember that your audience is an English
teacher. It is perfectly acceptable to be friendly and funny in your e-mails,
but you should always use your best spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Thanks
in advance.
Your assignments:
1. On June 11th or 12th
(the finals days), bring a hard copy of your favorite piece of writing from
this year to Mr. Kline in B206. This could be any mode or any genre; it could
be a piece you’ve written for class or written for fun; it could be a clean
copy or a copy with teacher feedback – I don’t care what you give me, I just
want to see writing that you’re proud of.
2. Relax. Take June off. Don’t think about
school again until after July 4th. Seriously. You’ve been working
hard this year and your brain needs a rest.
3. Memorize the definitions of some fancy
rhetorical strategies (attached). Expect
a quiz within the first week of class.
4. Read “How to Mark a Book” (attached).
5. In three separate weeks over the summer,
find two editorials that express opposite opinions on the same topic. For each
editorial, create a t-chart that lists the author’s arguments on one side and
your opinion of the author’s arguments on the other. Submit a copy of each
editorial with your t-charts. Editorials may be found in The Oregonian, or you may find one or more of these national
newspapers online: The New York Times,
The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Washington Times, Los Angeles
Times, Chicago Sun-Times, Boston Globe, New York Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, or The
BBC. Each of these news outlets has its own political bias, so it will be
instructive to note which papers you agree with most often. Also, The Oregonian often publishes edited
versions of editorials published in other papers. Noting such editorial choices
can be instructive and interesting. Bring
these with you on the first day of class.
6. Craft an essay that provides your personal
answer to the question “What does it mean to be an American?” You may base your
answer on your personal reading as well as events in the news, in history, and
in your own life. Your paper could consider the emotions, traditions, duties,
debts, obligations, and privileges of being an American.
This paper is the
foundation of this course, and will be revised several times over the year.
Please word-process your paper, following MLA format. This paper is due on the first day of class. The library is not open on
the first day of school, so you will need to arrive with a hard copy. Late
work is not accepted in AP Lang.
If you have any
questions or difficulties, do not hesitate to contact me via e-mail. My job is
to be your advisor, not your obstacle.
Happy Summer!
Kline
Handy reminder:
This document
will be posted to my AP Lang blog:
If anything
interesting happens over the summer, I’ll post it there.
Before the school year begins, be sure you understand the definition of all of
the following terms. Many of the terms are defined on the website The Virtual Salt:
Flash cards are
not required, but they make an excellent study aid.
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Rhetorical
Appeals
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Ethos
One’s
credibility as a speaker and writer.
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Logos
The
intellectual power of one’s speech or writing.
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Pathos
The emotional
power of one’s speech or writing.
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Style: Artful expression of ideas: detail, diction, figures of speech (see
below), imagery, syntax, tone
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Figures
of Speech
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Figures of Speech: Tropes
Artful
deviation from ordinary or principal signification of a word.
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Figures of Speech: Schemes
Artful
deviation from the ordinary arrangement of words.
|
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Reference to
one thing as another
- Metaphor
- Simile
- Allusion
- Synecdoche
- Metonymy
Word play/puns
- Personification
- Zeugma
- Onomatopoeia
Overstatement/understatement
Semantic
Inversions
- Rhetorical question
- Hypophora
- Irony
- Oxymoron
- Paradox
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Structures of
balance
- Parallelism
- Antithesis
- Inverted Syntax
Omission
Repetition
- Alliteration
- Assonance
- Anaphora
- Epistrophe
- Anadiplosis
- Epanalepsis
- Antimetabole
- Polysyndeton
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How
to Mark a Book
By
Mortimer J. Adler, Ph.D.
You know you have to read
"between the lines" to get the most out of anything. I want to
persuade you to do something equally important in the course of your reading. I
want to persuade you to write between the lines. Unless you do, you are not
likely to do the most efficient kind of reading.
I contend, quite bluntly, that
marking up a book is not an act of mutilation but of love. You shouldn't mark
up a book which isn't yours.
Librarians (or your friends) who
lend you books expect you to keep them clean, and you should. If you decide
that I am right about the usefulness of marking books, you will have to buy
them. Most of the world's great books are available today, in reprint editions.
There are two ways in which one
can own a book. The first is the property right you establish by paying for it,
just as you pay for clothes and furniture. But this act of purchase is only the
prelude to possession. Full ownership comes only when you have made it a part
of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it is by writing in
it. An illustration may make the point clear. You buy a beefsteak and transfer
it from the butcher's icebox to your own. But you do not own the beefsteak in
the most important sense until you consume it and get it into your bloodstream.
I am arguing that books, too, must be absorbed in your blood stream to do you
any good.
Confusion about what it means to
"own" a book leads people to a false reverence for paper, binding,
and type -- a respect for the physical thing -- the craft of the printer rather
than the genius of the author. They forget that it is possible for a man to
acquire the idea, to possess the beauty, which a great book contains, without
staking his claim by pasting his bookplate inside the cover. Having a fine
library doesn't prove that its owner has a mind enriched by books; it proves
nothing more than that he, his father, or his wife, was rich enough to buy them.
There are three kinds of book
owners. The first has all the standard sets and best sellers -- unread,
untouched. (This deluded individual owns woodpulp and ink, not books.) The
second has a great many books -- a few of them read through, most of them dipped
into, but all of them as clean and shiny as the day they were bought. (This
person would probably like to make books his own, but is restrained by a false
respect for their physical appearance.) The third has a few books or many --
every one of them dog-eared and dilapidated, shaken and loosened by continual
use, marked and scribbled in from front to back. (This man owns books.)
Is it false respect, you may ask,
to preserve intact and unblemished a beautifully printed book, an elegantly
bound edition? Of course not. I'd no more scribble all over a first edition of
'Paradise Lost' than I'd give my baby a set of crayons and an original
Rembrandt. I wouldn't mark up a painting or a statue. Its soul, so to speak, is
inseparable from its body. And the beauty of a rare edition or of a richly
manufactured volume is like that of a painting or a statue.
But the soul of a book
"can" be separate from its body. A book is more like the score of a
piece of music than it is like a painting. No great musician confuses a symphony
with the printed sheets of music. Arturo Toscanini reveres Brahms, but
Toscanini's score of the G minor Symphony is so thoroughly marked up that no
one but the maestro himself can read it. The reason why a great conductor makes
notations on his musical scores -- marks them up again and again each time he
returns to study them--is the reason why you should mark your books. If your
respect for magnificent binding or typography gets in the way, buy yourself a
cheap edition and pay your respects to the author.
Why is marking up a book
indispensable to reading? First, it keeps you awake. (And I don't mean merely
conscious; I mean awake.) In the second place; reading, if it is active, is
thinking, and thinking tends to express itself in words, spoken or written. The
marked book is usually the thought-through book. Finally, writing helps you
remember the thoughts you had, or the thoughts the author expressed. Let me
develop these three points.
If reading is to accomplish
anything more than passing time, it must be active. You can't let your eyes
glide across the lines of a book and come up with an understanding of what you
have read. Now an ordinary piece of light fiction, like, say, "Gone With
the Wind," doesn't require the most active kind of reading. The books you
read for pleasure can be read in a state of relaxation, and nothing is lost.
But a great book, rich in ideas and beauty, a book that raises and tries to
answer great fundamental questions, demands the most active reading of which
you are capable. You don't absorb the ideas of John Dewey the way you absorb
the crooning of Mr. Vallee. You have to reach for them. That you cannot do
while you're asleep.
If, when you've finished reading
a book, the pages are filled with your notes, you know that you read actively.
The most famous "active" reader of great books I know is President
Hutchins, of the University of Chicago. He also has the hardest schedule of
business activities of any man I know. He invariably reads with a pencil, and
sometimes, when he picks up a book and pencil in the evening, he finds himself,
instead of making intelligent notes, drawing what he calls 'caviar factories'
on the margins. When that happens, he puts the book down. He knows he's too
tired to read, and he's just wasting time.
But, you may ask, why is writing
necessary? Well, the physical act of writing, with your own hand, brings words
and sentences more sharply before your mind and preserves them better in your
memory. To set down your reaction to important words and sentences you have
read, and the questions they have raised in your mind, is to preserve those
reactions and sharpen those questions.
Even if you wrote on a scratch
pad, and threw the paper away when you had finished writing, your grasp of the
book would be surer. But you don't have to throw the paper away. The margins
(top as bottom, and well as side), the end-papers, the very space between the
lines, are all available. They aren't sacred. And, best of all, your marks and
notes become an integral part of the book and stay there forever. You can pick
up the book the following week or year, and there are all your points of
agreement, disagreement, doubt, and inquiry. It's like resuming an interrupted
conversation with the advantage of being able to pick up where you left off.
And that is exactly what reading
a book should be: a conversation between you and the author. Presumably he
knows more about the subject than you do; naturally, you'll have the proper
humility as you approach him. But don't let anybody tell you that a reader is
supposed to be solely on the receiving end. Understanding is a two-way
operation; learning doesn't consist in being an empty receptacle. The learner
has to question himself and question the teacher. He even has to argue with the
teacher, once he understands what the teacher is saying. And marking a book is
literally an expression of differences, or agreements of opinion, with the
author.
There are all kinds of devices
for marking a book intelligently and fruitfully. Here's the way I do it:
- Underlining (or highlighting): of major points, of important or
forceful statements.
- Vertical lines at the margin: to emphasize a statement already
underlined.
- Star, asterisk, or other doo-dad at the margin: to be used sparingly, to emphasize
the ten or twenty most important statements in the book. (You may want to
fold the bottom comer of each page on which you use such marks. It won't
hurt the sturdy paper on which most modern books are printed, and you will
be able take the book off the shelf at any time and, by opening it at the
folded-corner page, refresh your recollection of the book.)
- Numbers in the margin: to indicate the sequence of points the author makes in
developing a single argument.
- Numbers of other pages in the margin: to indicate where else in the book
the author made points relevant to the point marked; to tie up the ideas
in a book, which, though they may be separated by many pages, belong
together.
- Circling or highlighting of key words or phrases.
- Writing in the margin, or at the top or bottom of the
page, for the sake of:
recording questions (and perhaps answers) which a passage raised in your
mind; reducing a complicated discussion to a simple statement; recording
the sequence of major points right through the books. I use the end-papers
at the back of the book to make a personal index of the author's points in
the order of their appearance.
The front end-papers are to me
the most important. Some people reserve them for a fancy bookplate. I reserve
them for fancy thinking. After I have finished reading the book and making my
personal index on the back end-papers, I turn to the front and try to outline
the book, not page by page or point by point (I've already done that at the
back), but as an integrated structure, with a basic unity and an order of
parts. This outline is, to me, the measure of my understanding of the work.
If you're a die-hard
anti-book-marker, you may object that the margins, the space between the lines,
and the end-papers don't give you room enough. All right. How about using a
scratch pad slightly smaller than the page-size of the book -- so that the
edges of the sheets won't protrude? Make your index, outlines and even your
notes on the pad, and then insert these sheets permanently inside the front and
back covers of the book.
Or, you may say that this
business of marking books is going to slow up your reading. It probably will.
That's one of the reasons for doing it. Most of us have been taken in by the
notion that speed of reading is a measure of our intelligence. There is no such
thing as the right speed for intelligent reading. Some things should be read
quickly and effortlessly and some should be read slowly and even laboriously.
The sign of intelligence in reading is the ability to read different things
differently according to their worth. In the case of good books, the point is
not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get
through you -- how many you can make your own. A few friends are better than a
thousand acquaintances. If this be your aim, as it should be, you will not be
impatient if it takes more time and effort to read a great book than it does a
newspaper.
You may have one final objection
to marking books. You can't lend them to your friends because nobody else can
read them without being distracted by your notes. Furthermore, you won't want
to lend them because a marked copy is kind of an intellectual diary, and
lending it is almost like giving your mind away.
If your friend
wishes to read your Plutarch's Lives, Shakespeare, or The Federalist
Papers, tell him gently but firmly, to buy a copy. You will lend him your
car or your coat -- but your books are as much a part of you as your head or
your heart.
