This is what the college board says about taking AP Lang:
The AP English Language and Composition course is designed to help students become skilled readers of prose written in a variety of rhetorical contexts and to become skilled writers who compose for a variety of purposes. Both their writing and their reading should make students aware of the interactions among a writer's purposes, audience expectations, and subjects as well as the way generic conventions and the resources of language contribute to effectiveness in writing.
The goals of an AP English Language and Composition course are diverse because the college composition course is one of the most varied in the curriculum. The college course provides students with opportunities to write about a variety of subjects and to demonstrate an awareness of audience and purpose. But the overarching objective in most first-year writing courses is to enable students to write effectively and confidently in their college courses across the curriculum and in their professional and personal lives. Therefore, most composition courses emphasize the expository, analytical, and argumentative writing that forms the basis of academic and professional communication, as well as the personal and reflective writing that fosters the ability to write in any context. In addition, most composition courses teach students that the expository, analytical, and argumentative writing they must do in college is based on reading texts from various disciplines and periods as well as personal experience and observation. Composition courses, therefore, teach students to read primary and secondary sources carefully, to synthesize materials from these texts in their own compositions, and to cite sources using conventions recommended by professional organizations such as the Modern Language Association (MLA), the University of Chicago Press (The Chicago Manual of Style), and the American Psychological Association (APA).
As well as engaging in varied writing tasks, students become acquainted with a wide variety of prose styles from many disciplines and historical periods, and gain understanding of the connections between writing and interpretive skill in reading. Concurrently, to reflect the increasing importance of graphics and visual images in texts published in print and electronic media, students are asked to analyze how such images both relate to written texts and serve as alternative forms of texts themselves.
One way to help students synthesize and evaluate their sources is the researched argument paper. Researched argument papers remind students that they must sort through disparate interpretations to analyze, reflect upon, and write about a topic. When students are asked to bring the experience and opinions of others into their essays in this way, they enter into conversations with other writers and thinkers. The results of such conversations are essays that use citations for substance rather than show, for dialogue rather than diatribe.
Honestly, this makes it sound like an awful class to most students, so I reccommend that students about to take the class NOT read it.
The real reasons to take it are as follows:
1. You have an awesome teacher. Okay well I don't know about Ms. A, but Doctor Ayers is da bomb! First, he is a dcotor now so that automatically makes him cooler. Second, he is the funniest teacher I have right now. I don't go a day in his class without laughing.
2. You learn a lot. I now can crank out and essay in 45 minutes if I have to. All of the AP practice is important and helps you out alot.
3. We have an AP Lang Carnival, and it's awesome. So much better than those stupid lapotp carts. Ayers rents us a carnival to come in class about once a week and we basically have a huge party. It's awesome. So take Ap Lang. You won't regret it. Here are some pictures of the carnies we have met.
Now doesn't this look like a fun time? TAKE AP LANG!
And if you are enrolled in the course and are even thinking about dropping, I will find you!
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