all right y'all let's learn how to write a long essay question or leq for APUSH AP World or AP Euro it's the same rubric for all of them so everything I'm going to say applies to whatever course you're in and depending on your persuasion this might be the most difficult essay you have to write on your AP exam because look at it just sitting there judging you you don't know anything about this topic do you you do there are no documents no help you just have to crack open those brain folds and start writing so how do you do that how do you get a perfect score on the stinking leq well I'm about to tell you so if you're ready to get them brain cows milk let's get to it so the leq is the last thing you're going to have to do on your exam and you're going to have 40 minutes to write it you'll have already passed through the multiple choice and the short answer questions and the DBQ and if at that point you have any shred of life and human dignity remaining in your soul then you have what it takes to earn a perfect score in this essay which would be a six and before I get into the steps for writing you should know that the College Board tells you ahead of time from which periods they're going to be pulling these questions it's not a mystery it's right in their course and exam descriptions and here it is in a satisfying little chart you can see that they're going to give you three options and you only have to write one so make sure you choose the one that you know know the most about okay now let me just quickly mention that if you need more help that I'm going to give you in this video then you should check out my apsa crem course it goes into much greater depth on how to write dbqs leqs and saqs for AP World AP US and AP Europe it's got examples for every point on the rubrics and that will show you what earns the point and what doesn't plus there's videos from this guy that you're not going to find here on YouTube so if you're struggling with these essays that might be the thing to help you so Link in the description below okay now let's get to the steps for writing this essay step one read The Prompt just like on the DBQ your first task is to read The Prompt and when I say read it I mean really read it like understand what it's asking Mark it up and I emphasize this because as I never Tire of reminding you when you're under pressure you are dumber than you think that's not an insult it's just a fact of the universe so take a minute and really read it and when you do you're going to be basically looking for three things all of which you need to mark on the paper it don't be the guy who's like yeah well whatever I can remember it all no you can't write it down now the first thing you need to Mark in the prompt is the time period they give you remember if you write the most brilliant essay that has ever been written in the history of History writing but you're talking about the wrong time period no points for you and trust me here as someone who has scored these essays for the national exam one of the most frequent mistake students make is to write outside the time period that's given but not you my dear pupil not you you are going to mark That Thing Up you are going to underline that time period And if they give you a time period in centuries you're going to write out the numbers remember Under Pressure your IQ declines precipitously so when you see the 20th century write out the 1900s next to it just so you don't get confused now the second thing you want to Mark is the historical thinking skill they want you to write with so notice here they explicitly mentioned causation that means your essay needs to be a causation essay and if it's not it's going to be hard to earn any points and sometimes the AP overlords like to try to confuse you for example look at these prompts from the 2022 a push exam in all of them they want you to evaluate the relative importance of causes of different events so although you will be talking about causes it's really a comparison essay you're comparing the different causes and making an argument for which of them is most important so Mark the historical thinking skill because that's the skill that needs to frame your entire essay third Mark the categories they give you to write about this one wants you to compare the French Revolution and the Revolutions of 18 48 this one wants you to compare economic developments in different parts of Europe so don't write an essay comparing social or political developments and the way to save yourself from such an egregious mistake is by marking up the prompt all right step two get a six okay now that you've understood the prompt and what they're asking you to write about you need to understand the rubric and the points that you can earn the first point you can earn is for a thesis and you can get one point for this now in order to get that juicy Point your thesis has to do two things first it must be historically defensible that just means that your thesis has to make an argument like it has to take a St so for the first a push prompt for 2020 to you have to take a stand among the causes of migration during that period were religious freedom and Economic Opportunity so you can't just say two causes for population movement were religious freedom and Economic Opportunity that is an argument but it's not the kind of argument they're asking you to make you have to choose which one is more important and then go with that now the second thing your thesis needs to do is establish a line of reasoning this means you have to show how you're going to defend your argument and for this stuff some vocabulary in there like you can't just say there were many significant similarities between the French Revolution and the Revolutions of 1848 I mean yeah technically that is an argument but you have to to be specific like what similarities are you talking about like name them get specific so to ensure you do these things within your thesis let me give you a formula which goes like this restate the important parts of the prompt because A and B and here A and B represent the specific pieces of evidence that you're going to use to support your thesis so going back to the 2022 aush prompt here's an example of this formula in action population movement to Colonial British colonies occurred mainly for economic reasons because of the pilgrims religious freedom in Holland and the purely economic nature of James town so I made an argument here and I established a line of reasoning here so I'm going to argue in this essay that religious freedom wasn't actually a significant cause of migration and here are the two pieces of evidence I'm going to use and that smells like a point to me okay the second point in the rubric is for contextualization and for this one you can earn one point and essentially what they're asking you to do here is to put the argument of your thesis in its larger historical context and the rubric says that you can do this before during or after the prompt you know you do you boo but I have never seen anyone successfully contextualized during or after the period so my advice is to contextualize before the period that you're writing about I think that just makes more natural sense to us so what you're going to want to do here is to write one paragraph probably you know three to four sentences that sets the stage for your argument and don't go back too far in time only something like 50 to 100 years there are no hard fast rules on this but in general the closer you are to the time period you're writing about the better there are two things to mention here that are going to be the difference between a point and no point number one make sure you use specific historical evidence and number two make sure the evidence or historical developments you describe are relevant to the prompt so just make sure to be specific use vocabulary words here don't just talk in generalities okay now the next part of the rubric is the evidence section and here you can earn up to two points you can get one point for describing two pieces of evidence related to The Prompt or you can get two points for supporting your argument with two pieces of evidence okay now let me show you the difference between describing evidence and supporting an argument with evidence to describe evidence that's relevant to the prompt you just need to name it and then Define it so if one of your pieces of evidence is imperialism then I just named it and now I say which is when one nation extends political or economic control over another Nation okay and in that I just described the evidence but hey you're not here just to describe evidence baby you're here to get get all the points in this section so let me show you how to support an argument with evidence and to set you up for this let me suggest a paragraph structure that's going to help you form an argument first write a topic sentence this is going to be one of your sub arguments that you named in your thesis either the a or the B as my friend Rachel Carr always says your topic sentence always needs to steal from your thesis so let's use this prompt from the 2022 AP Euro exam for an example evaluate the most significant similarity between the French Revolution of 1789 to 1799 and the Revolutions of 1848 so let's say my thesis goes something like this the most significant similarity between the French revolution in the Revolutions of 1848 was the call from the lower classes for Liberal reforms and their ultimate failure after the installation of a conservative ruler so my first paragraph will have a topic sentence like this both the French Revolution and the Revolutions of 1848 began with calls for Liberal reforms from the lower class then I need to continue the paragraph with my evidence I'll talk about the three Estates in France and the marginalization of the Third Estate and the extravagant spending of Louis the 14th which created economic chaos in France and then I'll talk about the reforms demanded by the Third Estate Etc and all the while I'm going to be demonstrating how these pieces of evidence Pro prove my topic sentence and thus my thesis that's important always tie your evidence back to your thesis and then my second paragraph is going to deal with the installation of conservative rulers so I'll talk about Napoleon after the French Revolution he'll be a complex one because in many ways he upheld the Revolutionary gains and in other ways he did not and I'll talk about Napoleon thei and on an on so that is how you structure a paragraph that makes an argument okay now let's move on to the last section of the rubric the analysis and reasoning section in which you can earn up to two points the first point is awarded for your use of historical reasoning so basically this point is awarded for doing what the prompt told you to do like if the prompt is a causation question then you'll get this point if you successfully write an essay demonstrating causation and the same with change or comparison or whatever and look that's about as complicated as this point gets like did you perform the historical thinking skill that they asked you to perform if you structured your thesis and your paragraphs like I showed you it will be very hard to miss this point now the second point in this section is awarded for complexity and you can get one point for this and they've given you like six different ways to earn this point and that's all very complicated but by far the easiest and most straightforward is right here if you use at least four pieces of evidence throughout your essay to demonstrate a nuanced understanding then you'll at this point and that's kind of vague but my advice is to do this make sure two pieces of evidence support your argument while two pieces of evidence challenge your argument and again that's not required this is just my advice so if you're writing a causation essay then two pieces of evidence need to support your argument that X caused y while the other two pieces need to acknowledge that Z caused y but just make sure you explain why you think that X is a better explanation for the causation than Z okay well click here to watch my other videos on writing that go in depth into the various skills and points needed you can click here for my apsa crem course which will take you through every point of the rubric with examples for each so you can feel confident in writing for this course thanks for coming around and I'll catch you on the flipflop I'm Lou