My writing experience with AP Lang

 Photo by Ms. July

Introduction

My first vivid memory of writing is from my sophomore year of high school in my AP Lang class. I know wrote things all throughout middle school and earlier in high school, but none of it really comes to mind when I try to think about it. None of it is as memorable compared to the monster that this class was. The entire class focused on writing long essays and taking tests based on books that we read for class during our own time.

The quizzes

I didn’t love the entire class because the tests that we had to take were on the smallest minute details that you could think of. One of the questions that pops into my head asks about a specific streetlight color from one of the books that we read. Out of all the things that could have been asked about it was the color of a streetlight. Now it would help if I could remember which book that specific question came from, so I could give context on whether that book was just particularly boring or if it was a small book. But, I can’t remember the book. I can for sure say that it was not a small book; all the books had to be at least be 200 or more pages, they at least felt that long.

Most of the quiz questions are like this, they are obscure random facts nothing to do with the main plot of the book. That would be too easy for them. These quizzes only took place for the first half of the school year, where the second half was spent on learning the three types of essays that we would have to write for the final exam.

The Writing Portion

The main thing that comes to mind was the final exam, because it was an AP course the final exam and the entire class were very hard, harder than any class I have taken so far in college. This to me never made any sense because it’s supposed to represent what colleges classes are supposed to be like but whatever. The final exam from my memory was that we had to write three different essays within a certain time frame. I want to say the time was maybe two hours but that could be wrong. Within those two hours we had to write an argumentative, synthesis, and a rhetorical analysis essay.

With the given time the packet that we received recommended we take about 15 minutes to read and plan each essay and then 40 minutes to write the essays. It clearly stands out to me because it was torturous to have to do. Personally, for me the argumentative essay was the easiest and I still find those types of essays the easiest because it’s as simple as choosing a side and stating why you chose the side that you did and providing evidence as to why you believe you are correct.

The bad part

One of the other annoying points about this final exam is that for the sources we had to come up with an original source. Now I might be wording that wrong, but we had to use a source that wasn’t provided but that we just had prior knowledge about. You might think this was fine, which to be fair it did end up being fine because I passed the final exam but thinking about it just seemed weird. The essay topics could be about anything from why we should go to mars to why or why not George Washington was an alien. If you don’t have prior knowledge on these subjects it would be hard to write about them fully because of that missing information you would of just had to know about in preparation for taking the final exam.

Conclusion

All of this leaves a defining mark on you and that’s why I can remember it so vividly, because of how much I hated the stress of trying to write all of that while under a very strict time constraint. If my memory serves me right, we could also freely go back and forth between the essays, so we were allowed to spend more or less time on essays depending on if we needed the time or not. This might sound useful, but it makes it harder to allocate enough time for each essay because you just want to stay on one and keep working on it. You have to know when enough is enough and just move on and just hope that you ended up writing enough information to make it satisfactory.