Response to Course Materials - September 9

One concept which stuck with me from our lessons this week is that readers have their own vocabulary. I found the list of words to memorize tedious, until I understood that we need terms like 'paraprosdokian' and 'anaphora', not to sound pretentious, but to make discussions concise and not wrapped up in trying to describe specific literary devices. While taking the terms test, it was very frustrating how multiple terms could apply to one passage. Judging which answer is more right has never been a strong suit of mine. If I can learn to think about the intent of AP questions, it will help me determine which correct answer is more significant. Like the quote from V for Vendetta, 'People should not be afraid of their governments, governments should be afraid of their people'; while this is both an anadiplosis and a chiasmus, what is striking about the statement is not the repetition of the word 'government'; it is the parallelism and strong reversal of statements. This helped me understand how to start thinking about AP questions.