Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition
Summer 2013 Assignments
Dr. Heather Held, Collins Hill High School
Welcome to Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition! Know that this will be a challenging course, but I am sure you will all rise to the task. I am very excited to be teaching you all next year. Get plenty of rest this summer. We will be hitting the ground running in August!
You have three summer assignments. They are:
I. Read and annotate Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. If you do not know how to annotate, please first read the attached excerpt from Mortimer J. Adler’s essay. The annotation of novels will be a regular daily grade in this class, so start be making your commentary clear and obvious; also make sure your name is clearly written on the inside of the book’s cover, so I know who I am grading when you turn in books. You are to turn in the annotated book for Heart of Darkness on the same day as the novel test on this novel— Thursday, 8/8/13.
II. Read and annotate Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Like the first novel, the annotation will be a daily grade. You are to turn in the annotated book of Pride and Prejudice on the same day as the novel test on this novel— Friday, 8/9/13.
III. Write a college application essay (1½ - 2 typed pages – first draft due 7/31/13).
Procure a copy of an application for one of the colleges in which you are interested. For this assignment, you will need an application for either a college or university that requires an essay. Then, write a first draft of the essay. Since college application essays are not your typical essay, first person pronouns are allowed, but do not overuse them.
This first draft must be typed and formatted according to MLA guidelines (proper headers, font, margins, size, and spacing). Please include the essay’s prompt at the top of the essay in Times New Roman font size 9 (so I can tell where the prompt ends and your essay begins). We will talk about the college application process the first few weeks of school before you complete a final draft of this essay.
The rough draft must be turned in no later than 11:59 pm July 31, 2013. Email it to my school email address: . You will be completing a second draft of this essay in the first few weeks of the 2013-2014 school year.
If you have questions or concerns about the summer assignments, please do not hesitate to contact me. My Collins Hill High School email address is: . I will be out of town some during the summer, but I will make it a point to check my email a few times a week. Do not wait until the last minute to ask questions as it might take me a day or two to respond. Also, do not wait until the very end of summer to complete all three assignments!
See you in August!
Dr. Heather Held
From the article “How to Mark a Book” by Mortimer J. Adler
There are two ways in which one can own a book. The first is the property right you establish by paying for it, just as you pay for clothes and furniture. Full ownership comes only when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it is by writing in it. An illustration may make the point clear. You buy a beefsteak and transfer it from the butcher’s ice-box to your own. But you do not own the steak in the most important sense until you consume it and get it into your bloodstream to do you any good.
. . . The soul of a book CAN be separated from its body. A body is more like the score of a piece of music than it is like a painting. No great musician confuses a symphony with the printed sheets of music. However, the reason why a great conductor makes notations on his musical scores—marks them up again and again each time he returns to study them—is the reason why you should mark up your books. If your respect for magnificent binding or typography gets in the way, buy yourself a cheap edition and pay your respects to the author.
Why is marking up a book indispensable to reading it? First, it keeps you awake. (And I don’t mean merely conscious; I mean wide awake.) In the second place, reading, if it is active, is thinking, and thinking tends to express itself in words, spoken or written. The marked book is usually the THOUGHT-THROUGH BOOK. Finally, writing helps you to remember the thoughts you had, or the thoughts the author expressed.
If reading is to accomplish anything more than passing time, it must be active. You can’t let your eyes glide across the lines of a book and come up with an understanding of what you have read. The physical act of writing, with your own hand, brings words and sentences more sharply before your mind and preserves them better in your memory. To set down your reaction to important words and sentences you have read, and the questions they have raised in your mind, is to preserve those reactions and sharpen those questions.
. . . Best of all, your marks and notes become an integral part of the book and stay there forever. You can pick up the book the following week or year, and there are all your points of agreement, disagreement, doubt, and inquiry. It’s like resuming an interrupted conversation with the advantage of being able to pick up where you left off.
And that is exactly what reading a book should be: a conversation between you and the author. Proper annotation should be throughout each book.
Here are some devices for notating:
1) underlining- of major points, of important statements;
2) stars or asterisks- for important sentences;
3) question marks- if you get confused about something
3) circling- key words or phrases;
4) writing in the margins-:
· recording questions (and answers) which are raised in your mind,
· summarizing a complicated discussion / situation to a single statement,
· keeping a record of major points through the book;
5) highlighting- significant lines or passages.