Week 20: Week 20 — Q2 Review and Timed Writing
Week of Mon, Feb 1 · week closes Sun, Feb 7
This week's items
Exact due times are in Canvas. Late work accepted at 10% per day; assessed work not accepted late. Vocabulary quizzes are unannounced and cannot be made up.
Know these cold
- The three types of AP free-response questions — synthesis, rhetorical analysis, and argument — each require the same core skills: thesis, evidence, and reasoning. They differ in what they ask you to do with a text.
- A synthesis essay asks you to build an original argument using provided sources as evidence. Your claim drives the essay; the sources support it.
- A rhetorical analysis essay asks you to analyze how a writer's choices achieve a specific effect on the audience. Your thesis should name the choices and their effect, not just list what the text contains.
- An argument essay asks you to defend an original position on a provided issue using evidence from your own knowledge, reading, and experience.
- Logical fallacies undermine arguments not by producing false conclusions but by using flawed reasoning. Identifying a fallacy in your own draft — or in a source you are using — is a revision skill.
- Source evaluation and integration separate an argument that uses evidence from one that merely cites it. The explanation step — showing why a source supports the claim — is the most commonly missing element.
- Visual argument analysis uses the same toolkit as written argument analysis: identify the appeals, locate the emphasis, analyze the composition choices. OPTIC provides the structure.
- Tone and diction precision are not decorative — they are rhetorical. Choosing an exact word is making an argument about how the subject should be understood.
- In a 25-minute timed write, time management is itself a rhetorical skill: read the prompt twice, sketch a brief outline, write the thesis before the first body sentence, reserve five minutes for revision.
- Self-assessment is the bridge between practice and improvement. After each timed write, label each section, identify its strength and its gap, and name one specific change that would improve the weakest band.
Meerk's quiz — open the Week 20 gate
10 questions, no time limit. 85% on your first attempt in a 24-hour window opens the gate. Retakes inside the window are practice — they help you learn, they don't count. Work alone; the point is to know it, not to have seen it.
Dinner Table Question
Ask at home: After two quarters of AP Language, what do you know about your own writing that you did not know before?
En español: Después de dos trimestres de AP Language, ¿qué sabes sobre tu escritura que no sabías antes?