what's up guys my name is miss peer editor and today I'm going to show you all the tips and tricks I used in order to self study for the AP English language and composition exam and how I got a 5 so I'm going to walk you through some of the multiple choice strategies I used how I tackled the essays and any outside resources such as books that I used that I found really helpful in my preparation so first off multiple choice this section often trips people up because we don't really know how to tackle it the first time we see a passage and I find a couple of strategies that I used we're actually pretty helpful so for example what I would do whenever I had a passage for the AP English language exam is I would first read the questions without looking at the passage at all and see if the questions ever mentioned a line reference so for example in line 15 the author says this and for every line reference that I would find in the questions I would actually go into the passage before reading it and underline those lines and annotate the passage with the number of the question that the line reference correspond it to so then once I finished looking over all the questions I would go back actually read the passage and as I was reading the passage whenever I would hit that underlining or that line reference I would go and answer the question corresponding to that line so this is effective for a couple of reasons it actually keeps your mind fresh because as soon as you're reading that line you're forced to immediately answer the question rather than reading the whole thing forgetting about what that specific section is about and having to go back and retrace your steps and also it's really helpful because it allows you to first focus on the really specific narrow details of a passage before moving on to the big picture questions or the main idea questions of the AP lang exam which you can save for the end so that's just one strategy I find really helpful but if you know any other strategy that you think would be really useful put them down in the comments below so for the multiple choice exact or ssin of the exam it's really important that you know your rhetorical devices and literary devices in and out so there's a couple of ways that you can learn about these literary devices and really know how to apply them for the exam so a big mistake that a lot of people make when doing the exam is they simply make a big list of rhetorical and literary devices everything from tone and figurative language to metaphors and the like so they make a huge list of these terms with their definitions and just memorize and memorize and just try to absorb these definitions but the problem with this is you're not actually being tested on the definitions on the AP Lang exam you're going to be tested on the applications of the definitions so what I found really helpful was when I was studying I would not only write the definition of every literary device I needed to know but I would also write an example from a piece of text or prose or poetry of that device so that I actually know knew what it looked like in practice and for the multiple-choice portion of the exam I found the Barron's book really helpful because I tend to think that the Barron's book multiple choice in general for AP exams are actually harder than the questions on the AP exam so Barron's really prepares you by helping you tackle all the different elements of what a question might look like on the exam and another thing that Berens does really well is that it clearly has different categories of questions that might be asked so whenever I would get a question wrong on a Barron's multiple-choice test something I would do is I would never just check the answers and be done with it I would go back and see what kinds of questions I was getting wrong for example if I got a question on author's purpose wrong or literary devices or main idea then I would mark down those categories of questions and see what types of questions I was getting wrong the most and I would try to tackle those specific areas by changing the strategy of how I would read the passage or just doing a lot of those types of questions which I think can be really helpful now for the essay which some people might consider to be the hardest part of the exam there is a couple of strategies that you can use to guarantee that you will put your best foot forward on all three essays first off I actually do the three essays in order I know some people do tend to switch up the order but in general I think it's a good rule to keep the argument essay for last because you don't actually need any outside sources on the exam for that essay so for the synthesis essay specifically something that I highlighted in a previous video was a couple of strategies on how to tackle this essay specifically and I'll put the link down below in the description box but for the synthesis essay a neat trick that I found really useful was not solely relying on the information that was provided in the sources but rather also including outside information from sources that I knew about and I actually got really lucky the year of my exam because my topic that I had to write about was on libraries and I happen to know a lot about this topic so definitely using any information from outside articles periodicals books movies current events in the synthesis essay itself can kind of set your essay apart whereas other people might just be relying solely on the documents next for the synthesis essay make sure that the documents are not providing the main points of your argument they should rather be only supporting the arguments that you're making instead you should be forming your own argument and use statistics as testimonials different bits and pieces from those documents to piece together to bolster your rather than having it the other way around and for the rhetorical analysis essay the best thing to do for this portion of the exam is to practice practice practice so what I found helpful was when I pretty much did all of the past AP exams that I found on the College Board website I looked at the rhetorical passages that were provided to me and made a list of the the literary devices or rhetorical devices that I found the most frequently in each passage and made sure that I knew how to identify them I can potentially give you guys a brief list of those if you want just let me know in the comments below but honestly if you do that work and figure out what devices you can expect to see that will definitely take a lot of stress out on the day of the exam so that rather than focusing on finding the devices you'll just be worried about finding how those devices are important to the author's overall message and for the persuasive essay something or the argument essay something I found really helpful was making an info bank before the exam so what I mean when I say info Bank is creating an extensive document full of all of this outside knowledge that I could apply to pretty much any prompt so what that would mean is that I compiled a bunch of different books that I read recently some different current events that I knew about politics movies documentaries just or even just things that I learned from history class or you know science classes that I could apply to pretty much any prompt for example I know that in during my year for the exam I used a reference to one of my favorite books The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and I think it probably made my essay stand out a bit because even though it didn't necessarily directly fit to what the prompt was saying I made a pretty unique connection and through that I was able to support my argument even more and I know that I mentioned before the baron's is a great resource but so is cliff notes because this book and this study guide is really helpful for sample essays for all three prompts so I know that while these sample essays aren't necessarily perfect they have a great foundation as to what a good thesis looks like and how you can weave evidence well into your argument without providing without having your evidence overpower what you're trying to say that's it for today guys if you like this video please give it a thumbs up subscribe and tap the bell to receive notifications whenever I make a new video comment down below and let me know any questions you have on the AP lieing exam in general I'll see you next time