Response to Course Material

Over this past week, we spent most of our class time going over literary terms and the AP writing basics. The terms were very difficult to fully understand without first being exposed to examples showing their usage.  It was also frustrating to have to memorize a single word for something that I used to identify with a phrase or two. To me, it seemed silly to use a word such as paraprosdokian to describe a concept as simple as a surprise ending to a phrase. The word itself is not even recognized by Microsoft Word, so why should I need to know how and when to use it? My view of this changed, however, after looking at the PowerPoints on Spruz about AP essay writing. After seeing how extensive the process of identifying the rhetorical situation and setting up an argument is, I realized that these confusing terms might actually be able to help me create a more clear and concise essay after all. As Harvey often mentioned in The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing, it is important to not be overly pompous in your essay, and to stay focused on the topic. Keeping wordiness to a minimum by replacing lengthy phrases with these new literary terms will help do this. For example, one of the techniques used by authors is the repetition of conjunctions in a series of phrases. When writing about this in an essay, the word polysyndeton could be used to describe it instead of the nine words used previously. Since the majority of the essay is probably about a much greater topic than that repetition, it is better to use the term to describe it. This way the reader will not have to deal with the constant distraction of the writer straying from the main idea in attempt to describe a minor concept.