Wednesday, April 13

Welcome back to the AP Lang Blog!

We have a total of 11 classes left before you take the AP exam and three of those classes or only 45 minutes (Wednesdays).

Please read the following excerpt from the book A Crash Course in AP Lang and come prepared to take a quiz and then apply this information it to a practice essay on Friday, April 15.

Synthesis Essay

Scoring Guidelines

Remember this, because this is the first place where students trip up on the Synthesis essay: the College Board wants you to state your opinion. Don’t make the mistake of simply summarizing everything you know about the topic, and don’t try to stay detached from the topic at hand. Give your opinion -- whether you agree fully or conditionally, whether you disagree completely or partially. The College Board does not care what your opinion actually is -- you don’t lose points for challenging the central assumption of the prompt -- but the graders DO care if you can justify that opinion intelligently, coherently, and cohesively. In other words, the College Board wants to see you write effectively.

This is the #1 buzzword in all College Board documents; students who score an 8 or a 9 are rated as “effective,” whereas students who score a 6 or a 7 are considered “adequate.” (5s are generally “limited,” “uneven,” or “inconsistent,” according to the College Board. 3s and 4s are “inadequate,” 1s and 2s have “little success,” and 0s are completely off-topic. The question then becomes, what makes an “effective” piece of writing?

The answer is simple: In your answer, you must demonstrate that you know what to do. This means:

1. Responding to every part of the question in a well-developed thesis statement.

2. Forming an opinion of your own based in evidence and textual support.

3. Synthesizing at least three of the six attached sources.

4. Writing clearly, grammatically, and adeptly. That’s it.

Those are the four elements that go into effective writing -- and into scoring an 8 or a 9. It sounds simple, but there’s a lot that goes into this kind of writing, so keep reading for a better understanding of how to accomplish these four goals.

Understanding the Prompt In order to achieve both #1 -- responding to every part of the question in a well developed thesis statement -- and #2 -- forming an opinion of your own based in evidence and textual support -- you must actually understand what the question is asking. Just as importantly, you must be able to demonstrate that you understand how the attached sources are relevant to the prompt. You will have fifteen minutes to read the prompt and the attached sources. Use this time wisely. Pick apart the sources carefully to ensure that you understand their meaning. Annotate them in whatever way is most meaningful to you. Summarize their main points in a sentence or two so that you can quickly refer back to your notes when constructing your well-supported thesis.

Reading the sources carefully is a crucial part of understanding the prompt and constructing the thesis, and performing an in-depth analysis of the sources before you actually start writing will save you time in the long run. With that work done, you’ll have much of the support for your argument in place even before you begin writing

Constructing the Thesis

Perhaps you were lucky enough to have a familiarity with the prompt. If this is the case, you may have already had a thesis in mind after reading the question -- perhaps a knee-jerk response to the question that you felt instinctively was correct. But now that you have read the sources and considered carefully where every single one can fit in, you’ll want to revisit that original thesis. Remember, a thesis is a central claim or argument that you spend the rest of the essay developing and supporting. Remember, you have to respond to the prompt in some way. Do you agree? Disagree? Partially agree? Want to challenge? Defend? Modify the question in some way? This is where you state that opinion. And remember, you need a thesis that you can argue for convincingly and support using the attached sources.

When crafting the thesis, remember always that you should be doing something, whether it’s agreeing, disagreeing, challenging, defending, modifying, or anything else. In order to ensure that you have constructed the most effective thesis possible, think about the following questions:

1. What do these sources DO for the thesis? Meaning, how can I use these sources to help provide evidence for the thesis I have come up with?

 2. Which of these sources wholeheartedly supports my position?

3. Which of these sources is only partially helpful?

4. Which of these sources is not helpful at all but can be used as a straw man / counterargument? In essence, you must use the sources you are given to carefully build an argument, considering where every source will fit in. It is perfectly fine -- in fact, it is encouraged -- to pick sources apart, demonstrating a clear understanding of every part of the argument that each source is making.

Synthesizing Sources

For example, if half the argument fits perfectly with the thesis that you have constructed, but the other half doesn’t, feel free to make note of this. One of the main skills that the College Board emphasizes is the ability to “bring sources into  conversation with one another.” (Also known as “synthesis.”) This means that you must understand, on a deep level, every part of every source, so that you can decide what works for your thesis, what doesn’t, and how the sources fit together and work with each other. You may end up with a thought that looks like this: “Source B begins promisingly, but the latter half of the article devolves; to maintain the integrity of my argument, I would jettison the latter half of this source for the following reason…” Or “Source A is a clever but misleading analysis that gets away from the larger point at hand…” Or “Source D does an excellent job of laying out the following principles, which makes it an excellent proof for the argument that…”

Any and all of those thoughts are not only valid but encouraged; the College Board is explicitly testing your ability to understand and engage with sources on a deeper level. Using qualifying statements demonstrates not only that you understand every source well, but that you have a thorough understanding of how to USE the source -- which parts of it can be retained and which parts should be discarded, and why. This is a prime example of analysis -- breaking something down to its component parts and ensuring that you not only understand those component parts but that you can use all of them effectively. Without first understanding those component parts -- those bits and pieces that make up an argument -- you will not be able to fuse them effectively, and will end up with jagged edges or with an incomplete or unconvincing argument. Therefore it is crucial to analyze before you synthesize. “But aren’t analysis and synthesis opposites?” you may be asking. Technically, yes -- analysis means “taking something apart” while synthesis means “putting something together.” But think of it this way -- you are taking apart sources in order to make something new.

Synthesis is the art of fusing and melding disparate parts to create a unified and coherent whole. This is the skill that the College Board is assessing by giving you this essay prompt.

Arguing Your Point

More important than the position you take is the method by which you strengthen your argument. You must cite convincing evidence, utilizing at least three of the given sources. Since you have already come up with a thesis and conducted a thorough analysis of the necessary sources, this is where you will figure out how they all fit together -- how you will use the sources that you have annotated to provide evidence for every part of your thesis statement. Some how-to guides will suggest that you first create an outline once you have come up with your thesis and analyzed your sources, but before you begin writing. This is a strategy that works well for some people and works less well for others. You know yourself best, so if you know that you will spend too much time on the outline and not enough on actually crafting the essay, skip this step. (This is why it helps to practice repeatedly before you actually take the AP -- simulating test conditions will give you a much better idea of how you write under pressure.) However, whether you create an outline or just spend some time annotating how you will use each source, make sure you have a clear understanding of how each source fits into your thesis. This, after all, is one of the four important skills that the College Board is looking to assess.

Crafting Your Essay

You have read the prompt and you understand it. You have analyzed sources, crafted a thesis, and determined where each source will fit into your thesis. Now you are able to begin writing. Though the AP graders will assess your mastery of standard written conventions, they also understand that you have an hour to craft this well-structured and well considered essay, They are not expecting a masterpiece, so don’t worry too much about polishing every single word. Instead, focus on how you will fit every part of your argument together so it’s like a well-oiled machine, each part of the argument interlocking with the other to create something unified and cohesive.

The first thing to consider is structure. Every well-written and effective synthesis essay begins with a contextualization of the prompt -- you must introduce the ideas and give them a background, a context, locate them within a larger understanding of the issue. This would be an appropriate place to draw upon your own personal knowledge (providing, of course, that it is accurate).

introduction is crucial as it will help locate the issue for your reader, providing a smooth and easy to understand introduction to the issue at hand. In middle and high school, your English teacher may have referred to this contextualization as the “hook” -- the catchy opening that ensnares the reader from the very beginning. But don’t worry too much about making this opening “snazzy;” this is a surefire way to waste time. It’s much more important to present a complete and well-argued essay than a partially finished work with a great opening. At this point, you can insert your thesis. You’ve already spent time crafting it and ensuring that it performs some kind of action -- a defense, a challenge, a modification, etc. Now is the time to insert it into your essay and tackle the evidence. Unlike traditional five-paragraph-essays of the past, synthesis essays do not need to follow a specific, pre-ordained order. Since the goal is to bring all sources “in conversation” with one another and incorporate multiple sources, you can think conceptually and involve multiple sources in one paragraph. Think conceptually, not in terms of sources; you don’t need to give each source one paragraph because it seems more “organized;” instead, think about the concept that each source aims to tackle or deconstruct.

When you think conceptually and dedicate a paragraph (or several) to each part of a concept, rather than each discrete source, you will have a much easier time integrating and synthesizing your sources. This is where you annotations will have come in handy -- if you’ve annotated your sources, then you will have a good idea of what concept each source relates to. Since multiple sources can all touch on the same topic in different ways, this is a perfect way to synthesize the various sources and bring them in conversation with one another. You can comment on how Source B and Source C focus on the same issue, but point out that Source B takes a negative approach while Source C is more moderate. Or you can take note of the fact that Source D and Source F take radically different approaches to the same idea, and comment on which you find more convincing, and why. It isn’t disorganized to integrate multiple sources into one paragraph based on similar concepts; it’s conversation. It’s synthesis