B: YOU’VE MISREAD PART OR ALL OF THE TEXT.
Problem
The
writer...
Solution/Strategy
Relies on
paraphrase
or summary.
This is what happens when you don’t understand what you’ve read. If you don’t really
get the point of what you’ve read, but you know you’ve got to write something, you
tend to simply restate the text or summarize it. If you do this, your score will be quite
low. Summary is not analysis.
To understand the reading, you need to look again for key points. (See Chapter 10 on
reading and Chapter 12 on understanding themes.) Knowing what you might look for
will help you avoid misunderstanding.
Has factual
errors.
You misstate or misrepresent some aspect of the text. This does not mean you are
misinterpreting—it means you are making faulty references, saying the text says one
thing when it doesn’t.
The only way to fix this is through careful reading. You cannot replace careful
reading with skimming. You are not skimming to find an answer to a question—you
are reading to gain an in-depth understanding. See Chapter 10.
Makes an
unnecessary
observation.
You may be giving too much emphasis to a discrete aspect of the text. Instead, base
your claims on a broader understanding. In general, do not attribute too much meaning
to one word or incident. On the other hand, one word can be critical, especially if it
is isolated, or repeated. Learn to see elements of a text in the context of the whole.
Has no real
thesis, but
instead gives
a list of
literary
terms.
Many times the prompt suggests literary elements to consider in your analysis of the
text, but these are means to an end. You must have some reason to mention them.
There is no value in pointing out the evocative images in the second stanza if you
don’t intend to explain why they’re important to the poem as a whole.
Fails to
address the
second poem
(or passage).
The AP Lit exam will often provide two texts to consider for a compare/contrast
exercise. Most often the texts are poems. If you understand one and not the other, you
will earn a low score because you are failing to meet the expectation of the prompt. In
any compare/ contrast exercise, look for the corresponding ideas, literary elements,
and themes. A simple Venn diagram in the margin might help you organize your
thoughts.
Presents
There are two ways to think about this. One is that you lost track of what you were
arguing and decided to go a different way, or, more likely, you weren’t sure what the
