Intentions Matter

When I think about AP Lang, I think about the three essays I had to plan and write within two hours and fifteen minutes on Tuesday, May 9, 2023 at 8 in the morning. Maybe this is because this was the most challenging and important part of the course for me, but this is also because this exam was what I was constantly trying to connect what I was learning in class to. However, I have realized that I have been subconsciously connecting lessons from this class that may typically be in preparation for the AP Exam to things far larger.

This school year I have had to learn how communication affects relationships whether it has been with friends or authority figures. At the beginning of the school year, during the early stages of these struggles, I had a lot of trouble understanding these people and their intentions. This ultimately led to me feeling hurt and resentful towards these people.

I then learned about the Rhetorical Triangle and how to rhetorically analyze a text. Identifying purpose, rhetorical techniques, intended audience, and finding specific evidence to back these ideas up turned into reading further into a person’s tone of voice and thinking past certain actions to a person’s motives or intentions before reacting inappropriately. Practicing rhetorical analysis brought these ideas more to my attention in my everyday life, especially with coaches and friends. Before getting mad or feeling hurt by something someone did or said to me, I would now use these skills to analyze what they did, which would help me see things from perspectives other than my own. Being more aware and mindful of all these perspectives helped me overcome the many communication problems I had faced throughout this school year more quickly, even if it forced me to realize that some of my initial thoughts and reactions were wrong.

Rhetorical analysis of texts was something I practiced often because of the rhetorical analysis essay for the AP exam. This concept was easier for me to study, as it is more formulaic in comparison to something like evidence for an argument essay. However, I still attempted to study for the argumentative essay as much as I could. The main way I could do this was through researching potential evidence. We were assigned an optional worksheet to organize potential pieces of evidence for argumentative essays, which helped me with this task I chose to take on. Throughout completing this worksheet, it forced me to think deeper not only about events I’ve learned about in school, but into everything I’ve ever done and experienced and everything I’m passionate about. People say making mistakes is one of the best ways to learn, and I’ve agreed with this, as I have applied this way of thinking into things such as basketball and school. Thus, I had never really thought about learning anything from random experiences I’ve had or drama in pop culture that I spend hours consuming and learning about. Preparing for the argumentative essay opened my eyes to always learning. It allowed me to find learning opportunities in places I would never have found before.

Using my experience preparing for the AP exam, I also learned that it was crucial to use the scoring rubric to curate my work. I could write a beautiful essay about my personal experience regarding a topic, but that could still get me a very low score on the exam because it didn’t hit certain criteria on the scoring rubric. Similarly, in my everyday life, I learned to apply this idea, as it was more effective in my relationships to be more thoughtful and conscious about my words and actions depending on the person I was dealing with. People will always want different things done certain ways and prefer different solutions with different feelings and emotions, so it’s important to try to figure out the most preferable and considerate actions to take.

AP Language and Composition taught me much more than just analyzing writing choices and how to write a killer essay to score well on the AP Exam. It taught me how people communicate: how people deliver intentions, receive intentions, and create intentions, all of which have helped me greatly throughout this past semester.

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