A.P. Lit Is Writing about Prose: December 2, 2014

Focus: How can we improve our timed writing skills?

Project people: Please turn in your proposals

1. Warming up: Offering you a special glimpse of how my mind works when I calculate your overall grades in progress

2. Trying out a few tips for Free Response Question #2

Tip #1: Pay very, very careful attention to the first inch and the last inch of the passage and how the author establishes tone.

Tip #2: Consider the passage's point of view and why the author has chosen it.

• First-person point of view is in use when a character narrates the story with I-me-my-mine in his or her speech. The advantage of this point of view is that you get to hear the thoughts of the narrator and see the world depicted in the story through his or her eyes. However, remember that no narrator, like no human being, has complete self-knowledge or, for that matter, complete knowledge of anything. Therefore, the reader's role is to go beyond what the narrator says.

• Second-person point of view, in which the author uses you and your, is rare; authors seldom speak directly to the reader. When you encounter this point of view, pay attention. Why? The author has made a daring choice, probably with a specific purpose in mind. Most times, second-person point of view draws the reader into the story, almost making the reader a participant in the action.

• Third-person point of view is that of an outsider looking at the action. The writer may choose one of the following:
• third-person omniscient, in which the thoughts of every character are open to the reader; this is a godlike point of view.
• third-person limited, in which the reader enters only one character's mind, either throughout the entire work or in a specific section. Third-person limited differs from first-person because the author's voice, not the character's voice, is what you hear in the descriptive passages.  

• Please remember that we say "narrator" when we're talking about prose (as opposed to "speaker" when we're analyzing poetry).

http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/understanding-point-of-view-in-literature.html

Tip #3: Read the passage as closely as you would read a poem, seeking significant imagery, diction, symbols, metaphors, etc.  

3. Performing a timed writing on Free Response Question #2

HW: 
1. Please read through Chapter 23 for tomorrow and through the end of the novel for our final Socratic seminar on Friday.  Reading ticket possibilities:

• 10 good questions/inferences
• A mini metacognitive on an important little paragraph
• Charting out patterns established in Chapter 1
• Drawing a significant scene and identifying/explaining briefly at least five symbolic elements in that scene

2. If you haven't started working on your poetry paper or project, now is a good time to do so!  Remember that we will have a work day on Friday and our final Socratic on Invisible Man on Monday.