At the start of the year, I was doing fairly well with the Multiple Choice section, but truly struggling with the Poetry Benchmark and Prose Passage Benchmark essays. I mostly struggled to grasp the complexity in texts, instead conducting very superficial analyses.
Now, I've learned the importance of identifying binary opposites (especially through comparing and contrasting poetry), which has definitely helped me get to the heart of poems. I've found that while different AP prompts will ask different questions, all essentially require me to distill the meaning of the work. What is the author really trying to say? And how are they saying it? This focus on the central themes of each work has definitely strengthened my ability to write stronger three-sentence theses. Learning different poetic forms also allowed me to perform better on the multiple choice section, as well as allowed me to draw connections between a work's structure and meaning. I've also improved in my selection of literary devices to focus on. Instead of treating essays as an opportunity for me to showcase my knowledge of obscure literary devices, I've learned to refer only to what is relevant to my thesis.
Overall, I have especially improved in my interpretation of literature, but I still have much room for improvement. Next semester, I would like to improve my ability to synthesize different sources, and to better connect themes across works, as this was something I struggled with in my synthesis charts for my seminar discussions.
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