AP Lang, as Taught by Boromir

Grammar, Punctuation, and Usage Tips

I’m going to add some links here based on what I see people doing in this term’s revised essays.

First up, Grammar Girl has some tips for how to use colons correctly in a sentence. Please read up on them.

Second, block quotes. This is different in MLA and APA, so you need to know which of those you mean to use.

Third, transitional words and phrases. Here’s a list of purposes and actual words and phrases that you can use to connect your ideas between the last paragraph and the next.

Fourth…

Links to Recent Nonfiction

Here are some places you can go for lists of recent nonfiction:

New York Times Bestselling NF (Hardcover)

New York Times Bestselling NF (Paperback)

Kirkus Reviews’ Best NF of 2011 List

Salon.com’s Best NF of 2011 List

Wall Street Journal’s Best NF of 2011

Once you have a book chosen, you might try searching for your author on CSPAN’s BookTV site, which has a lot of interviews with nonfiction authors.

 

More Good Reviews

These are all from the famed New York Review of Books:

• Freeman Dyson’s review of Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
• Diane Ravitch’s review of Pasi Sahlberg’s Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland? Diane Ravitch herself has a recent (and successful) book on education.
• Pianist Charles Rosen’s review of Jonathan Kregor’s Liszt as Transcriber, which is a biography of composer Franz Liszt.
• Bonus learning: Peter Osnos’ article about the New York Review of Books, and why it continues to be awesome.

It’s almost like I’m leading up to something here.

A Few Book Review Essays

We’ll be getting to these soon, but if you want to beat me to the punch, or you just have the time now and you’re not sure you will later, feel free to read them. I’ll be trying to guide you toward reviews from Slate, the New York Times Sunday Book Review, the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review. I’ve also included one from David Frum’s blog, and I might add some from other places.

Here’s Dan Kois at Slate, reviewing The Lifespan of a Fact, by Iowa Citian John D’Agata and Somewhere Elsian Jim Fingal. Interesting essay about the ethical responsibilities of a nonfiction author to be truthful.

Slate political columnist Dave Weigel reflects on the shooting of Rep. Gabby Giffords, critiquing Tom Zoellner’s new book on the subject.

Mark O’Connor discusses an out-of-print book by Martin Amis: a guide to classic video games.

In the New Yorker, Rollo Romig ponders religion, government, and Simon Critchley’s new book The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology.

And here’s the one from former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum: a five-part (!) review of Charles Murray’s book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. That has been a controversial enough book that it’s worth including the New York Times review and the LA Times review as well… But Frum’s is an in-depth analysis and argument, and worth the time.

William Hazlitt, “On the Want of Money”

Here is the full text of the essay we were discussing today. The excerpt used on the AP Language exam is the ninth paragraph, by my count (not including those one-line quotations). Here’s a quote from the first paragraph that might help illuminate things:

The want of money I here allude to is not altogether that such arises from absolute poverty – for where there is a downright absence of the common necessaries of life, this must be remedied by incessant hard labour, and the least we can receive in return is a supply of our daily wants – but that uncertain, casual, precarious mode of existence, in which the temptation to spend remains after the means are exhausted, the want of money joined with the hope and possibility of getting it, the intermediate state of difficulty and suspense between the last guinea or shilling and the next that we may have the good luck to encounter.

That last bit–”the intermediate state of difficulty and suspense between the last guinea or shilling and the next”–makes it pretty clear that he’s talking about the poor here, not just the middle class who would like to be holding a higher rung of the ladder.

Now obviously, you don’t have access to this when answering the prompt, so I’m not posting it for that purpose. But it might be reassuring to some of you that I’m not just throwing this out there as my opinion of what he might mean.

Like AP Lang. Please.

No, not the class. It’s probably too late to convince you of that if you’re not already there. I mean on Facebook.

Why? What do you mean why? I’ll figure out what to do with it later. Now go.