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AP English Language

AP English Language

Original price was: $99.00.Current price is: $49.00.

This AP® English Language practice set emphasizes nonfiction rhetoric and composition across memoir/biography, criticism/opinion/satire, science writing, popular academics, pre-20th-century prose, and targeted composition & writing skills. You’ll analyze argument, evidence, style, and structure—and practice revising for clarity and coherence.

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Units
Memoirs and Biographies

(Voice, narrative stance, memory, identity across eras.)

  • “Corn-Pone Opinions” (Mark Twain, 1901)
  • The Story of My Life (Helen Keller, 1903)
  • “The Moral Equivalent of War” (William James, 1910)
  • “The Handicapped” (Randolph Bourne, 1911)
  • “Pamplona in July” (Ernest Hemingway, 1923)
  • “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” (Zora Neale Hurston, 1928)
  • “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (Martin Luther King Jr., 1963)
  • “The Santa Ana” (Joan Didion, 1968)
  • “The Call of the Wild” (Wallace Stegner, 1982)
  • “The Stranger in the Photo is Me” (Donald Murray, 1991)
  • From “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley” (David Foster Wallace, 1997)
  • “After Life” (Joan Didion, 2005)
  • “Thank You, Esther Forbes” (George Saunders, 2007)
  • From “On Being an Only Child” (Geoff Dyer, 2011)
  • Strength in What Remains (Tracy Kidder, 2011)
  • From “Dumb Kids’ Class” (Mark Bowden, 2012)
  • Wild (Prologue) (Cheryl Strayed, 2012)
  • Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake (Anna Quindlen, 2013)
  • The Empathy Exams, Ch. 1 (Leslie Jamison, 2014)
  • “The Terrorist inside My Husband’s Brain” (Susan Schneider Williams, 2016)
  • From Between the World and Me (Ta-Nehisi Coates, 2017)
  • “Scars: A Life in Injuries” (David Owen, 2017)
  • “My Childhood Home” (John Waters, 2017)
  • “On Weddings” (Leslie Jamison, 2019)

Criticism, Opinion, and Satire

(Rhetorical strategies in cultural critique.)

  • “Was the World Made for Man” (Mark Twain, 1903)
  • “Universities and their Functions” (Alfred North Whitehead, 1927)
  • “The Law of Human Nature” from Mere Christianity (C. S. Lewis, 1952)
  • “A Proposal to Abolish Grading” from Compulsory Mis-Education (Paul Goodman, 1964)
  • “E Unibus Pluram” (David Foster Wallace, 1993)
  • America’s Dysfunctional Relationship with Good Food, from The United States of Arugula (David Kamp, 2006)
  • “Class Dismissed” (Walter Kirn, 2010)
  • “Marketing to Children” (Sharon Beder, 2012)
  • “A Bad Day for Grendel” (Anthony Esolen, 2013)
  • Evicted (Prologue & Epilogue) (Matthew Desmond, 2016)
  • “A Critic’s Manifesto” (Daniel Mendelsohn, 2017)
  • “Men Still Too Often See Their Writing as the Canon” (David Hayden, 2018)
  • “Prison, Spectacle, Refuge” (Nigel Rothfels, 2019)
  • “Celebrity Matters” (Holly Grout, 2019)

Science Writing

(Explanation, evidence, and style in scientific popularization.)

  • The Land of Little Rain (Mary Hunter Austin, 1903)
  • “A Law of Acceleration” (Henry Adams, 1904)
  • From The Lives of a Cell (Lewis Thomas, 1974)
  • “The Royal We” (Steve Olson, 2002)
  • “A Private Plague,” from The Emperor of All Maladies (Siddhartha Mukherjee, 2011)
  • “Genetically Modified Crops Are the Key to Human Survival” (Robin McKie, 2011)
  • “The Social Life of Genes” (David Dobbs, 2013)
  • “How We Save Face—Researchers Crack the Brain’s Facial Recognition Code” (Knvul Sheikh, 2017)
  • “Scientists Are Spelunking for Cave Gunk to Fight Superbugs” (Kate Baggaley, 2017)

Popular Academics

(Readable scholarship; argument + accessibility.)

  • “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (T. S. Eliot, 1921)
  • “Tense Present: democracy, English, and the wars over usage” (David Foster Wallace & Micah Houser, 2001)
  • “Consider the Lobster” (David Foster Wallace, 2004)
  • From The Paradox of Choice (Barry Schwartz, 2004)
  • “Authority and American Usage” (David Foster Wallace, 2006)
  • “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (Nicholas Carr, 2008)
  • “English is Not Normal” (John McWhorter, 2015)
  • “Euphemise This” (John McWhorter, 2016)
  • The Color of Law (Preface & Epilogue) (Richard Rothstein, 2017)
  • Speak Not (James Griffiths, 2021)

Pre-20th Century

(Foundational prose, argument, and style.)

  • “To the Reader” (Montaigne, 1580)
  • “Of Marriage and Single Life” (Francis Bacon, 1625)
  • “Remarks on Gay’s Monument” (Samuel Johnson, 1738)
  • “Preface to the English Dictionary” (Samuel Johnson, 1755)
  • “Obstructions of Learning” (Samuel Johnson, 1758)
  • “Give Me Liberty” (Patrick Henry, 1775)
  • “The Crisis, No. 1” (Thomas Paine, 1777)
  • “On War” (James Boswell, 1777)
  • A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Mary Wollstonecraft, 1792)
  • “Nature” (Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1836)
  • “Self-Reliance” (Emerson, 1841)
  • Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)
  • “Civil Disobedience” (Henry David Thoreau, 1849)
  • “Ain’t I a Woman?” (Sojourner Truth, 1851)
  • “Battle of the Ants” (Thoreau, 1854)
  • Walden (Thoreau, 1854)
  • “Letter to President Pierce” (Chief Seattle, 1855)
  • “Gettysburg Address” (Abraham Lincoln, 1863)
  • “On Women’s Right to Vote” (Susan B. Anthony, 1873)
  • “The Gospel of Wealth” (Andrew Carnegie, 1889)
  • How the Other Half Lives (Jacob Riis, 1890)
  • “Stickeen” (John Muir, 1897)

Composition and Writing Skills

(Revise for clarity, organization, evidence, and style.)

George H. W. Bush Biography; Coffee Science; Wind Power; Handwriting vs. Keyboarding; Cleopatra; Eat the Rainbow; The 19th Amendment; Notre Dame Fire; Lead Poisoning; 9/11/2001; Public Protests; Standardized Tests; School Refusal; Reenactments; Electoral College; Who Needs the FEC?; New Evidence; Little Women; Elizabeth Bennet; The “Slum Crisis”; The Washerwomen’s Strike; The Jungle; J. R. R. Tolkien Biography; Stan Lee Biography; The Lost City of Troy; Plant-Based Diets; Are Emojis Words?; Arts Education; The 1928 Summer Olympic Games; Robert Mugabe; Bring Back the Phone Call; The Lyme Disease Controversy; Great Lakes Water Levels; Sports Equipment Innovations; Fast Fashion; Mary Wollstonecraft Biography; Monarch Butterflies.

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