THE APPROACH

Step-by-step approach to the essay section:

• Take a watch and note the time. Remember: 40 minutes per essay.

• Pick the essay you want to write first.

• Identify the key words in the essay prompt.

• Skim the passage.

• Work the passage, make notes, and identify quotations you will want to use.

• Use the Idea Machine to plan your first paragraph.

• In your body paragraphs, support and develop the points you made in your first paragraph.

• Get a solid conclusion on the page. Your conclusion can be as important as your introduction, and it usually is.

• Repeat the process with the other essays.

The Idea Machine

• is a series of questions that direct your reading to the material needed to write an essay.

The Idea Machine

1. What is the meaning of the work? a. What is the literal, face-value meaning of the work? b. What feeling (or feelings) does the work evoke?

2. How does the author get that meaning across? a. What are the important images in the work and what do those images suggest? b. What specific words or short phrases produce the strongest feelings? c. What do the characters, setting, structure, or narrators tell you about the passage?

The Classic Essay Question

In your response you should do the following:

• Respond to the prompt with a thesis that presents an interpretation and may establish a line of reasoning.

• Select and use evidence to develop and support your line of reasoning. Explain the relationship between the evidence and your thesis.

• Use appropriate grammar and punctuation in communicating your argument.

The classic essay question actually breaks down into three questions:

1. What does the poem or passage mean?

2. How did the author get you to see that? Were elements like character, setting, structure, narration, and figurative language deployed? Which ones?

3. How do the answers to questions 1 and 2 direct your knowledge to adequately answer the question?

The Meaning of Meaning

• The meaning of a work of prose fiction or poetry is the most basic, flat, literal sense of what is said plus the emotions and passions behind that sense.

Let’s consider an example:

Think of how much will be lost by the Twitter version. Can the tweets really let us know Hamlet’s suffering, his frantic (and occasionally crazed) attempts to figure out what is going on with his father and his uncle? Of course not, but those emotions are part of what the story means. They are the most important part of your essay

Identify the Key Words in the Prompt

• The specifics mentioned in the essay prompt are what you should pay close attention to when you read.

• Identifying precisely what the Readers want you to write about can help you focus on those aspects of the poem or prose fiction.

• You want to talk about what meaning you found in the poem or passage, and then use that as a foundation to discuss the topic about which the question specifically asks.

Dylan Thomas’s “In My Craft or Sullen Art”

In my craft or sullen art

Exercised in the still night

When only the moon rages

And lovers lie abed

With all their griefs in their arms,

I labor by singing light

Not for ambition or bread

Or the strut and trade of charms

On the ivory stages

But for the common wages

Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart

From the raging moon I write

On these spindrift pages

Nor for the towering dead

With their nightingales and psalms

But for the lovers, their arms

Round the griefs of the ages,

Who pay no praise or wages

Nor heed my craft or art.

Use the Idea Machine:

1. What does the poem say, literally?

   “Dylan Thomas explains that he isn’t writing for money or fame but for lovers who don’t even care about his writing.”

2. What is the feel of the poem?

   You might have picked up on a few aspects of the tone: pride, grief, loneliness, perhaps futility, and also perhaps the opposite of futility—a sense of total purpose.

3. What is the meaning of the poem for your AP essay?

   Dylan Thomas’s “In My Craft or Sullen Art” explores the pride, grief, loneliness, futility, and yet sense of total purpose that come from the author’s struggle to write not for fame or for wealth but for “the lovers, their arms round the griefs of ages.”

4. How does the author achieve his effects?

   Thomas gives us an image of himself, laboring alone “by singing light” and contrasts this with an image of self-contained completeness, of lovers wrapped in each other’s arms, oblivious to all the world and even to his poetry. By repeating these images, and key words like “moon,” “rage,” and “grief,” he emphasizes the power of his emotions and the intensity of his need to define himself and the purpose of his art.

Imagery and Words

• We chose to mention the contrasting images of the author working alone and of the lovers in their self-enclosed togetherness.

You might have chosen something else but the point to remember is this:

It’s always a safe bet to talk about imagery

In writing (as opposed to cinema or theater or painting), an image is made of words.

• If a word sticks out as unusual or particularly vivid, think about it. Ask yourself, why did the author use that word? What effect does that word have?

Opposition

• occurs when any pair of elements contrast sharply.

• Another way to think about opposition is tension—think of the two opposing elements as if they were magnetized poles, attracting and repelling each other.

• Opposition provides a structure underneath the surface of the poem, which you will unlock by discovering the oppositional elements.

For example, a cerebral, intellectual style that’s heavy on analysis in a story about a hog farmer would be opposition.

Another important opposition is tone.

• Some writers will write about the silliest thing possible in a deadly serious way.

Still another opposition, one that is often handled with supreme delicacy and with seemingly infinite repercussions, is time.

• Writers will often let the past stand in opposition to the present.

After the First Paragraph—Do an Essay Check

When you finish your first paragraph, stop and ask yourself the following questions:

1. What points does my first paragraph indicate I’m going to cover?

2. Do those points address the specifics the essay question calls for?

3. In what order am I going to put my points?

Developing Your Essay

• Go with the flow.

• As long as your ideas have some connection to the question that was asked, include them.

• Once you’ve finished your first paragraph and your essay check, it’s time to develop your essay through examples.