SAMPLE ESSAY
The following prompt was on the 1994 AP Lit exam.Read the following passage, from “A White Heron” by Sarah Orne Jewett, carefully.
Then write an essay showing how the author dramatizes the young heroine’s
adventure. Consider such literary elements as diction, imagery, narrative pace, and
point of view.Key words in the prompt are “adventure” and “heroine.” The prompt urges you to think of Sylvia’s
excursion in the old pine tree as a hero’s journey. A list of literary elements is given. Diction and imagery
are elements of any piece of literature, so those are not unexpected in the list. And while narrative pace
and point of view are not uncommon, mentioning them specifically is a hint that they function specifically
in this passage.
Find the passage by clicking on the “Sarah Orne Jewett Text Project” at Professor Terry Heller’s home
page: http://www.public.coe.edu/~theller. Look for the first seven paragraphs in part II. The passage
begins, “Half a mile from home, at the farther edge of the woods, where the land was highest, a great
pine-tree stood, the last of its generation.” The passage on the AP Lit exam was abridged from what you
find here, but you will have a good sense of what students had as their text for this prompt.
[Note: This essay was not scored by AP readers, but is here as a model of an above-average essay.]
In this excerpt from A White Heron by Sarah Orne Jewett^2 , the author takes us^3 on an adventurous
journey with Sylvia, a small, but far from timid heroine, who shows that courage and tenacity can yield
amazing results.^4 Jewett’s imagery, diction and shift in point of view create an epic tale of a strong-willed
little girl who climbs into a world she has previously only imagined to glimpse the wide world beyond
her own^5.
Jewett characterizes Sylvia as a “wistful” child who has long wondered about the old, lone pine tree
“the last of its generation^6 ,” believing that anyone who climbed it could see the ocean. Sylvia is a young
heroine with an adventurous spirit who is filled with “wild ambition,” a brave girl with “tingling, eager
blood coursing the channels of her whole frame.” While Sylvia is no stranger to climbing trees, the
biggest tree she has previously explored is^7 the white oak whose “upper branches chafed against the pine
trunk.” She now knows she must go beyond the world she is familiar with and make “the dangerous pass
from one tree to the other, so the great enterprise [can] really begin.”