Mid-term Exam Follow Up

I was impressed with most of the rhetorical item analysis essays you wrote for the mid term, and think most would get at least a 6/9.  However, there is always room for improvement.

• Always attempt to use AP related vocabulary - especially the devices from our A to Z list.  Instead of using "word choice" use "diction." Instead of using "quotation" use "appeal to authority" or "ethos."  
• Memorize everything on that list.  If you reference a simile - make sure you know what a simile is.  If you encounter a metaphor, it might help to describe it as an "extended metaphor" or even an "allegory" if these terms are more accurate.
• Don't take the easiest path right away.  This signals to the AP reader that you might not have a good understanding of the text. 
• Avoid conjecture.  Interact with the text and embed it when doing so adds credible and specific context.    
• Avoid fluff or speculation. Stick to the prompt. If the prompt doesn't ask you to identify when or where or how the author wrote the text, don't comment on that.  Starting your essay with unnecessary misinformation isn't ideal.  As well, don't get too creative.  Get to the heart of the matter.  Padding with fluff signals to the AP reader "I'm not sure what to write about, but here's a quote from Benjamin Franklin I like to use which I'll somehow connect to something when an idea comes."

      Since you spent time writing the essay on Barry's "The Great Influenza," I think we should stick with it to get the most from it.  Here is a link to AP Collegeboard's criteria for this essay, with three examples (good, decent, not so great):

AP Scoring Guidelines

Here is a breakdown of the reading which offers more than enough explanation of the rhetorical devices you could have/may have discussed.

AP Strategies.org

Here is a further breakdown:

Strategy to write a good essay: Identify a passage that most exemplifies the writer's most dominant rhetorical strategy or strategies. Restate the author's question using different words. Create a list of his or her strategies, and prioritize and choose the one that is the strongest and most used - tracking the examples. Should you write your intro first or last? It might help to skip the intro, but leave space for it if you are uncertain how to best map your essay.  

In the following passage from The Great Influenza, an account of the 1918 flu epidemic, author John M. Barry writes about scientists and their research. Read the passage carefully. Then, in a well-written essay, analyze how Barry uses rhetorical strategies to characterize scientific research.This is the focus of the question. Students should focus on the true intent of the prompt - it is not to identify the qualities of scientific research.  Turn the prompt into a question: How does Barry characterize scientific research? How does he use rhetoric to characterize it that way?

He is characterizing it as the quest for certainty - heroically embarking on a challenging quest.

To be a scientist requires not only intelligence and curiosity, but passion, patience, creativity, self-sufficiency, and courage. It is not the courage to venture into the unknown. It is the courage to accept—indeed, embrace—uncertainty. Use of dashes in the thesis. For as Claude Bernard, the great French physiologist of the nineteenth century, said, “Science teaches us to doubt.”

A scientist must accept the fact that all his or her work, even beliefs, may break apart upon the sharp edge of a single laboratory finding. And just as Einstein refused to accept his own theory until his predictions were tested, one must seek out such findings. Appeal to ethos by referring to Eintstein Ultimately a scientist has nothing to believe in but the process of inquiry. To move forcefully and aggressively even while uncertain requires a confidence and strength deeper than physical courage.

All real scientists exist on the frontier. Even the least ambitious among them deal with the unknown, if only one step beyond the known. The best among them move deep into a wilderness region where they know almost nothing, where the very tools and techniques needed to clear the wilderness, to bring order to it, do not exist. There they probe in a disciplined way. There a single step can take them through the looking glass reference to Lewis Carroll “Alice in Wonderland” into a world that seems entirely different, and if they are at least partly correct their probing acts like a crystal Crystal as simile to precipitate an order out of chaos, to create form, structure, and direction. A single step can also take one off a cliff. Use of Syntax, form follows the function.


In the wilderness the scientist must create . . .everything. It is grunt work, tedious work that
begins with figuring out what tools one needs and then making them. A shovel can dig up dirt but cannot penetrate rock. Would a pick be best, or would dynamite be better—or would dynamite be too indiscriminately destructive? If the rock is impenetrable, if dynamite would destroy what one is looking for, is there another way of getting information about what the rock holds? There is a stream passing over the rock. Would analyzing the water after it passes over the rock reveal anything useful? How would one analyze it? These questions mimic the scientific process. But are they there to elicit the obvious answer as strictly "rhetorical questions?" No.  They are genuine questions a scientist should ask. 


Ultimately, if the researcher succeeds, a flood of colleagues will pave roads over the path laid, and those roads will be orderly and straight, taking an investigator in minutes to a place the pioneer spent months or years looking for. And the perfect tool will be available for purchase, just as laboratory mice can now be ordered from supply houses. Not all scientific investigators can deal comfortably with uncertainty, and those who can may not be creative enough to understand and design the experiments that will illuminate a subject—to know both where and how to look. Others may lack the confidence to persist. Experiments do not simply work. Regardless of design and preparation, experiments—especially at the beginning, when one
proceeds by intelligent guesswork—rarely yield the results desired. An investigator must make them work. The less known, the more one has to manipulate and even force experiments to yield an answer. The final sentence essentially answers the long awaited position on the questions posed in the beginning where we expect a firm thesis.  Track the writer's opinions when clearly and firmly stated.  When are sentences simple and when are they complex sentences? Use plus(+)/minus(-) to identify how the writer feels about their topic at the end of each paragraph. It can show how an argument turns in a different direction. It can be a shift in the view that the author has on the topic. Signals a shift in idea from what I believe to what I now want you to believe.