Advice
My first piece of advice to you is to take my following suggestions with a grain of salt. Every student will have a different experience. Thus, it’s unlikely that exactly all of my suggestions will work for you (however, if they do, that’s great). You’ll need to glean the useful pieces for yourself. Most importantly, it’s paramount that you develop your own strategies as the school year progresses.
What advice do I have?
Mindset
I’m not your typical mindset coach, but your mentality matters.
Grades and scores are important. But keep in mind that you’re also preparing to get better at English. While you’re preparing, remind yourself of process-oriented goals, such as:
I want to have better vocabulary.
I want to read three well-written books per month.
I want to learn how to write like the pros.
That helps you stay focused on things you can change (process) rather than things you can’t (future or past scores). During the two months of intense preparation, I wanted a 5 on the exam. But at the same time, I wanted my abilities to improve.
Don’t give up, even when you feel like it. It’s going to be tough, but I promise you that it’ll be worth it.
I get bugged when I hear of those people who work hard and leave once they’re at a certain level. After the AP exam or the school year, you should have acquired some habit, knowledge or insight from the process sticks with you. Did you learn?
The story continues.
Kobe Bryant
Read
To do well in AP Lang, you must have excellent reading comprehension. If you don’t have that, there’s a very simple solution – read well-written prose with intention. Actively read – identify the main idea of the passage, its purpose, the claims, supporting evidence, any acknowledgement of the counterargument, etc.
Read frequently. If you don’t like reading or don’t have a habit yet, try reading topics from science, history or literature you enjoy. I promise you’ll find some good titles – just look for them yourself.
Now, if you “don’t have time to read” and you have a tight that doesn’t allow for any reading, I have a brutal solution for you.
Replace the time spent on social media with reading.
It’s that simple. I know it’s hard, but how badly do you want the score?
Memorize Vocabulary
AP Lang. has a lot of vocabulary that you probably haven’t encountered in your lifetime. You should familiarize yourself with common words that show up in the passages and prompts. Know the words in the answer choices (e.g refute, depicts, illustrates, etc.). Also, you should ideally memorize a list of common AP Lang. rhetorical terms (e.g simile, anthropomorphism, allegory, etc.). Some of these may not appear on the exam. But the more you know, the better.
Expanding your vocabulary is something that people don’t do enough of, but it rapidly increases your reading comprehension and enhances your writing quality. It helps you with school in general (which you’ll be in for many more years, most likely).
I know it’s hard, but how badly do you want the score?
Write
I strongly recommend you to keep a blog or diary to keep your writing skills ship-shape. Read a lot of good prose and analyze how the author delivers their arguments.
Exam Tips
These exam tips should not be a replacement for active language improvement. If you’re not a strong reader, the bulk of your score increase will come from the three tips I talked about above.
For the multiple-choice section of the AP English exam, you’ll have an hour to answer forty-five multiple-choice questions. For the free-response section, you’ll have two hours and fifteen minutes (which includes a 15-minute reading period for the synthesis essays) to write three well-crafted essays.
As cliche as it sounds, practice a lot of timed essays and multiple choice passages, either in-class or at home. You can practice the whole section, or you can do allot time for individual essays (40 minutes) and passages (12 minutes). It’s not a lot of time, so you want to get used to the timed setting as much as possible.
For MCQs, you can try process of elimination (POE). I sometimes do that, but sometimes it’s easier to just predict the answer choice from the question stem and select the right option. It’s much faster and more efficient than POE. Again, you can only do this with good reading comprehension, so read!
For FRQs, design your own order of attack. On the exam, I did synthesis, argument and rhetorical analysis, in that order, because it made sense to write the argument right after you’ve taken a subjective in the synthesis essay (as Ms. D says, “you’re on a roll here”). It may not work for everyone. Be clear and concise, and remember that the quality of your claims and supporting evidence will determine the bulk of those six points. Don’t spend too much decorating the introduction!
Most importantly, design your own study plan and test strategies. Your success will be dependent on the effort you put in, not what others think you can do or the amount of resources your teacher provides. Learn to take your own responsibility, because you’ll need to when you’re an adult.
I hope this helps. Enjoy your summer!