The AP English Language and Composition course is designed to help you become a skilled reader of a variety of texts as well as becoming a skilled writer. You’ll achieve this through awareness of the interactions among a writer's purposes, audience expectations, and subjects, as well as the ways that writing rules and language use contribute to effective writing.

Skill in writing proceeds from your awareness of your own composing processes: the way you explore ideas, reconsider strategies, and revise your work. This experience of the process of composing is the essence of the first-year college writing course, and the AP English Language and Composition course emphasizes this process. In the course, you will write essays that proceed through several stages or drafts, with revision aided by your teacher and peers. These extended, revised essays are not part of the AP English Language and Composition Exam, but the experience of writing them will help you become a more self-aware and flexible writer (which may help your performance on the AP Exam!).

In addition to engaging in varied writing tasks, you will read and become acquainted with a wide variety of prose styles from many disciplines and historical periods. Due to the increasing importance of graphics and visual images in texts published in print and electronic media, you will learn to analyze images as they relate to written texts and serve as alternative forms of texts themselves.

Using research materials and synthesizing information from various sources are integral parts of the AP English Language and Composition course. You will learn to evaluate the legitimacy and purpose of sources used. One way to do this is through the researched argument paper, which will require you to sort through various interpretations of information to analyze, reflect upon, and write about a topic. When you bring the experience and opinions of others into your writing in this way, you enter into conversations with other writers and thinkers, which in turn helps your writing become more thoughtful and substantive — just what is required in college and careers!