UNDERSTANDING ANALYSIS AP English Language and Composition

DEFINITION  A way of understanding  Break apart the whole to put it back together in a MORE MEANINGFUL way  Parts in relationship to one another  Awareness of chemistry of the logic  Should lead to a deeper understanding as a whole  Clothing analogy  Understand the significance of the subject and develop an idea of your own  Form of exploration

YOUR PURPOSE HAS EVERYTHING TO DO WITH HOW YOU BREAK THE OBJECT DOWN AND CHOOSE TO SEE IT  Speaker analogy  Song analogy  Your essay prompt will determine how you break down the passage

WHEN PREPARING ANALYSIS, YOU SHOULD CONSIDER  Purpose  Subject  Exigence  Why?  Voice Lessons Practice

ANALYSIS FOCUS: SYNTAX  The way words are arranged in sentences  Sentences must have a subject-verb.  Encompasses word order, sentence length, sentence focus, and punctuation

SYNTAX: WORD ORDER  Subject-verb-object/complement  Change in word order can startle the reader and draw attention to the sentence.  Emphasizes unusual message  Inverting subject and verb  Am I ever sorry!  Placing a complement at the beginning of a sentence  Hungry, without a doubt, he is.  Yoda  Placing an object in front of a verb  Sara I like- not Susan.

SYNTAX: SENTENCE LENGTH  Short sentence following a longer sentence shifts the reader’s attention.  Modern writers use it for key ideas.  This is not always true for pre-20 th century texts  Look for the relationship between length and emphasis.

SYNTAX: SYNTACTIC TENSION  Withholding sentence closure until the end of the sentence  Periodic sentence  As long as we ignore our children and refuse to dedicate the necessary time and money to their care, we will fail to solve the problem of school violence.  Reaching syntactical closure early-loose sentence  We will fail to solve the problem of school violence as long as we ignore our children and refuse to dedicate the necessary time and money to their care.

SYNTAX: REPETITION  Word, phrase, or clause  Draws attention to meaning

SYNTAX: PUNCTUATION  Reinforces meaning  Sentence types: declarative, imperative, interrogative, exclamatory  Semicolon-gives equal weight to two or more independent clauses (reinforces parallel ideas.  Colon-directs reader to the words that follow  Dash-marks a sudden change in thought or tone, sets off a brief summary or sets off a parenthetical part of a sentence.

SYNTAX PRACTICE  Consider:  “The impact of poetry is so hard and direct that for the moment there is no other sensation except that of the poem itself. What profound depths we visit then—how sudden and complete is our immersion! There is nothing here to catch hold of; nothing to stay us in our flight…The poet is always our contemporary. Our being for the moment is centered and constricted, as in any violent shock of personal emotion. --Virginia Woolf, “How Should One Read a Book?”

FOCUS: SYNTAX 1.Woolf uses a variety of sentence types in this selection. Among them is the exclamatory sentence. Identify the exclamatory sentence and explain its effect. 2.Classify each sentence as to length: short, medium, or long. How is the meaning of the passage reinforced and clarified by sentence length?

WRITING PRACTICE  Write a declarative sentence about college entrance examinations. Then write an exclamatory sentence which amplifies or clarifies the declarative sentence.