Poetry

The aspect of poetry that seems to give me the most difficulty is poetry with a lot of complex syntax and figurative language. Often times what happens to me is I will begin reading a poem loaded with difficult language, and I will start off not really understanding the first stanza. The rest of the poem normally builds off from its intro, and I end up not understanding any of the poem during my first reading. What I find helps a lot though is not only re-reading the poem, but also looking at the questions before giving the poem a second read. I find that the questions not only tell you what to look for, but they also narrow down options of what certain words or phrases could symbolize or mean. For example, if you look at question 10 on page 121 of the Peterson’s AP English book, the question asks, “What does the word ‘bark’ mean?” Upon my first reading of the poem, I was not sure what that word meant in this context, but looking at the options I decided choice E, “a type of boat”, made the most sense. Without the question and options, I definitely would have had more trouble deciphering the poem.

AP Lit Diagnostic Exam

I will admit, I was a bit surprised when taking this AP Lit diagnostic exam. First, it was a lot than I expected. From my experience taking other AP exams last year, I have realized that when taking an AP test you are not in nearly as much of a time-crunch as you are in other standardized tests such as the ACT and SAT. That being said, I was surprised at how much time I had left over: nearly 20 minutes. I went back and was able to quickly read each passage again and check over my answers. Next time I take an AP Lit practice test though, I will definitely try to take more time reading and re-reading the passages as I go along, rather than all at once at the end. When I look back on questions after having gone through a whole test, I often feel that I second-guess myself and, though I catch some of my mistakes, I also change some of my correct answers to incorrect ones.

One aspect of the test that I had a bit of trouble on was the poetry, particularly the first passage. I did not think it was a very straightforward passage and some of the figurative language and metaphors were a bit difficult to decipher. I had significantly less trouble with the second poetry passage, probably in part because it was shorter, but I also thought the images in the second poem were a lot easier to picture.

The other two passages, one from Pride and Prejudice, and the other about the Civil War, were relatively easy to read and gather the main ideas and messages. Questions such as numbers 20 and 25 were pretty simple, asking how Austen described certain characters in the last paragraph. The questions in the Civil War passage were similarly direct, such as number 43, asking about the meaning of “reechoings of the old music”. The answer was B, rewriting old material, something that was stated more than once within that same paragraph.

Overall, I feel that I am much stronger at interpreting prose than poetry, and this test was definitely not an exception.