A.P. Lit Has Been Drafted: April 20, 2015

Focus: How do little prompts grow into big essays?

1. Warming up with happy Monday thoughts

2. Unraveling the mind-boggling process of how a prompt becomes an outline; developing sub-questions for your prompt if you have not yet done so

Click here to see how Chase turned his prompt into an outline.  Note: I highly recommend using questions to guide your outline.

3. Offering you some examples of how outlines turn into body paragraphs

Click here to see Brooke's outline and draft (hers is literary / philosophical).

Below are a few scraps from my culminating essay, which was more personal:

I discovered that the entire world can fall away from you while you’re just lying there on the couch with a white homemade baby blanket in your hands.  It just floats away like a tiny a globe with everyone and everything in it, except you.  And my husband had to squeeze me hard in his arms before I could climb back into that globe.  It hurt, coming in and out of life, like when your foot pricks itself out of numbness after falling asleep.  Aibileen from The Help describes it the best as she remembers the death of her son: “That was the day my whole world went black.  Air look black, sun look black.  I laid up in bed and stared at the black walls a my house.  Minny came ever day to make sure I was still breathing, feed me food to keep me living.  Took three months fore I even look out the window, see if the world still there.  I was surprise to see the world didn’t stop just cause my boy did” (Stockett 2-3).  My walls had turned black, too.  And I didn’t care to see if the world was still out there.

But a week later, after trying unsuccessfully to squeeze back into designer jeans, I told my husband that I wanted to hire Mark to be my personal trainer.  Mark ran an independent boot camp twice a week that my husband had been attending for a year.  Unlike the trainers who ran boot camps at my regular gym, Mark was an actual army guy, and he didn’t take crap from anyone.  He seemed like the right pick to be my personal trainer.  I needed him to be my Nick Carraway, inclined to reserve all judgments, or my Rahim Kahn, convincing me that “there is a way to be good again” (Hosseini 1).

My ending:

As I write this, I wonder if this is a story to pass on.  I think it is.  But I’m still not sure if I answered my own question, so I’d like to end with this:

In Beckett’s perplexing world of waiting where characters constantly fall to the ground, Vladimir quietly asks Pozzo, “What do you do when you fall far from help?”

Pozzo replies, “We wait till we can get up.  Then we go on.  On!” (Beckett 102).


4. Inspiring you to think outside the box with some images from a less traditional essay from a few years ago:

HW:
If you'd like feedback on your brainstorming, outlining, and drafting, please send me an e-mail with your specific inquiries. If you just Google share a document with me, I'm not sure what you'd like help with.

New final due date: April 27 (however, if you turn yours in early, it will be the first one graded and returned).