AP Language and
Composition
Summer Homework, 2013
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. Many of these assignments require
access to the Internet and to e-mail. If you do not have dependable e-mail
access, feel free to use good ol’ fashioned snail mail. I love snail mail!
Kline’s Contact Info:
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. Relax.
Take June off. Don’t think about school again until after July 4th.
2. Memorize
the definitions of some fancy rhetorical strategies (attached). Expect a quiz within the first week of
class.
3. Read
“How to Mark a Book” (attached).
4. Craft
an essay that provides your personal answer to the question “What is justice?”
You may base your answer on your personal reading as well as events in the news
and in your own life. You may consider other questions, such as who deserves
justice? Who abdicates their right to justice? Who decides who deserves
justice?
This paper is the foundation of this course, and
will be revised several times over the year. Please word-process your paper,
double-spaced, in a clear, easy to read 12-point font. This paper is due on the
first day of class. Late work is not accepted in AP classes at OCHS.
5. It
is essential for good rhetoricians to be aware of the news of the day.
Beginning on August 8th, I would like you to send me weekly e-mails
tracking your engagement with the news media. I realize that many families take
advantage of the summertime to travel, so consult with your family about your
vacation schedule at the beginning of the summer. It is acceptable to begin
this assignment early, but you may not end it late. I expect to receive four
e-mails (in four different weeks) by the first day of school.
Your e-mails should include the
following information:
- What
news stories (notice that “stories” is plural) are you following? What
new news stories have caught your eye this week?
- What
sources are you using? Be specific here: give the name of the newspaper,
website, blog, television, or radio programs you use to gather
information. Feel free to consult multiple sources within a given week
and to change sources from week to week. It will be informative to note
different perspectives, voices, and approaches used by different media
and different media outlets.
- Who
have you talked with about the news of the week? What have you learned
from your conversations?
6. Read,
or reread, The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn by Mark Twain. As you read, consider Twain’s novel in terms of the two
main focuses of this course: the theme of justice and acts of argumentation.
Take notes regarding examples of injustice and justice served. Use those notes
to track Twain’s arguments about justice (answering – among other questions -
who, according to Twain, merits justice? Who is denied justice? How is justice
promoted and injustice punished?). Pay particular attention to tone, diction,
and the use of satire (the definition of satire can be found online or in any
reliable dictionary). I recommend annotating each chapter for easy reference
later. Please check out a copy from the OCHS Library so we can all reference
the same page numbers.
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
- 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
Omission
Repetition
- Alliteration
- Assonance
- Anaphora
- Epistrophe
- Anadiplosis
- Epanalepsis
- Chiasmus
- 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.
