The Practical EnglishTeacher is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com.
This blog has materials that I used to teach the AP Lang & Comp synthesis essay. I always thought the synthesis essay would be the easiest essay for my kids to write (since the examples they needed to support their arguments were embedded in given texts), but this was never the case. The synthesis essay was hard for them in a few different ways. First, they had to learn how to read and annotate all of the documents purposefully. Then they need to learn how to choose the best and most concise pieces of evidence and then they needed to tie that information into an argument and develop it with their own commentary. Lastly, a lot of kids always wanted to include the visual (whichever one was included that year) into their argument, but they almost never did a good job analyzing the piece. There are some visual analysis materials at the bottom that I used to help with the visual analysis problems. Please enjoy these free AP synthesis essay materials. I hope some of this stuff is helpful to you!
Synthesis Essays Materials
Whenever I had kids do a practice synthesis essay, they would always want to write about the source with the visual even though their visual analysis sucked. To remedy this, I started doing explicit lessons about visuals and how to analyze them. I have found these materials to be helpful in my IB Lang & Lit class, as well.
Other
If you have any AP Lang & Comp synthesis essay materials that you'd like to share below, please feel free.