Week 10 Core Concepts (11.15-11.26)

AP Multiple Choice Questions


Strategies:
- Know what you're supposed to do: read the questions carefully
- Know your enemy: know and recognize the structures of the questions. (See handout for detailed explanations)

• Rhetorical function
• Context
• Antecedent
• Style
• Tone

- Know yourself: use test taking skills, recognize your weaknesses




Hamlet
- Revenge tragedy

- Fall of someone whose character is good

- Character has a fatal flaw

- Hero is hesitant

- Hero's sanity questioned

- Hero contemplates suicide

- Multiple levels of intrigue

- Able, scheming villain

- Lots of soliloquies

- Sensationalized idea of murder/lots of death

- Started as Norse myth

Week 9 Class Notes (11.08-11.12)

Thesis statements:

- Answer the hidden "So what?" question. 

- Don't mention technique; instead, focus on meaning.

- Can be more than a single sentence.

How to write a thesis from OWL @ Purdue: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/545/01/

Cite the full author and title of a piece the first time it is mentioned in a paper.

Week 7 Class Notes (10.25-10.29)

This week, we read talked about plagiarism, drama, and read Oedipus.

Plagiarism is using another's ideas or words as your own.

- order of ideas counts as well. 

- be careful paraphrasing - change the order of ideas, not just words. 

- not necessary to cite something if it's common knowledge; that is, not proprietary knowledge. If many sources agree on a certain fact, it does not need to be cited. 

Drama is a performance used to create an illusion of reality - "verisimilitude."
- requires the "willing suspense of disbelief"
- sometimes playwright has to make compromises to make a production work - not as flexible as filmmakers or novelists

Types of Drama:
- Tragedy: usually involves ruin of leading character (s); fall of a noble, though flawed, character.
- Comedy: leading character(s) overcome a difficulty
- Melodrama: blend of tragedy and comedy - serious action with a happy ending
- Tragi-Comedy: like melodrama, but more complex; more likely to contain humor
- Problem Play: drama of social criticism; discusses problems facing society
- Farce: ridiculous comedy
- Comedy of Manners: comedy that "wittily portrays fashionable life"
- Domestic/Bourgeois Drama: serious play that deals with "ordinary" people