AP Lit Blog

AP LIT EXAM I felt very well prepared to take the AP Literature exam, and I believe that I performed very well on it. I think the biggest reason for my success was my reason to identify universal themes and center my writing around these themes. Especially on the Open Question, when you are potentially flooded by all the options to write about, I was able to quickly identify the universal theme and think through which novel I believed connected the best to this theme, which I believe made a much stronger, more focused essay. My biggest struggle has always been the multiple choice, mainly because of time but also because I struggle to gain the correct meaning from a quick reading, a fact that was also slightly detrimental to me on the Prose and Poetry essays. However, during the school year, with all of the practice we did, I greatly improved in articulating a complexity and identifying character traits that were much more complex and indicative of deep thinking that helped improve th...

Welcome to "The Sin That Can Never Be Forgotten: Guilt, and the Cycle of Betrayal and Redemption in Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner and Alice Notley's "Betrayal"". To view all of my TED Talk materials, please click "READ MORE" TED TALK PPT TED TALK SCRIPT OPEN QUESTION FINAL ESSAY PROSE PASSAGE FINAL ESSAY POETRY FINAL ESSAY

Monster Ball Storyboards Introduction with Prose Passage Thesis Statements & Analysis Thesis: In The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Reverend Dimmesdale is forced to convince Hester Prynne to reveal the name of her fellow adulterer, who, unknownst to the audience, is himself. As he turns his fate over to Hester, Dimmesdale distances himself from his own emotions of fear and uncertainty in order to fulfill his societal duty of preaching to the people about the wickedness in sinning. In doing so, he relies on Hester’s words to protect his societal status of being considered one of the holiest people in society. Hawthorne emphasizes the inverted relationship between emotion and societal responsibility by juxtaposing the intimacy of the situation with the formalness of the diction, the contrasting tones of the speakers, and the opposing sentence structures within Hester Prynne and Reverend Dimmesdale’s tense, ambiguous conversation. Analysis: As a sharp cont...

As my Burns Supper Extra Credit, I put together a costume to reflect something that a Scottish person would wear. Because of Scottland's geographical location, in my research of Scottish attire, it was common to see multiple layers of clothing. The traditional dress, called the Highland dress, is characterized by a tartan (plaid) pattern that is then accessorized with jackets, badges, and sashes as an indication of family and heritage. Using these elements, I chose to create a layered tartan look by clothespinning and tying two flannel shirts around a simple, base dress to create a similar look to a Highland dress. As I did not have a plaid skirt, I chose a simple navy dress as a base instead and choose to layer on tartan elements instead. Many looks also included shawls or blazars over a dress, and to create that, I layered a trench coat over the dress. Because of the trench coat's pleated light gray pattern, it actually added to the look to make it seem like I had mor...

Robert Burns Supper Individual Paragraph: Moving away from his bitter and contemptuous review of society, the narrator's tone becomes passionate and protective as he shifts to address his daughter. The narrator builds his character as a loving, doting father, referring to his daughter as "my bonny" (ll. 13, 19) and promising her that she's no worse off than if she had been legitimate, as he will still love her "as near and dear [to] my hear" (l. 21). He seals this proclamation by his faith and promises to guide her through whatever hatred and taunts the world can produce, reassuring her that even the priests have seen him helping "out o' Hell" (l. 24). The narrator seemingly embraces being a "fornicator" (l. 7) and upholds that even if his daughter was "unsought for" (l. 14) and he had to endure much hardship just to keep her, he believes his daughter to be worth the fight and that she was "no unwrought for"...