I’m terrible at satire. Maybe it’s just because I’m naturally a more gullible person since I’m definitely terrible at picking up sarcasm, but I like to think that it’s better to take something seriously than to laugh it off as a joke, because what if the person actually is being serious?! But unfortunately this way of thinking hasn’t really helped me on the practice AP Lit exam because I just end up misinterpreting the passage and answering most of the questions wrong until I finally figure out in the end (the direction and wording of the questions actually do help a lot with my figuring out if I interpreted the passage right or not… unfortunately its just not until I’ve gone through most of them that I realize this T_T” … so perhaps I could read the questions first? I’d just be worried about managing time then…) and by then I’m running out of more time and I’ve got to go go and finish reading other passages. So I guess what I have difficult time with satire or any pieces where the speaker is mocking or making some critical comment about the subject of the passage is whether or not their being serious about their suggestions or just poking fun at the person they’re talking about. I do wonder if practicing sarcasm in my daily conversations would help though? I’m not a terribly witty person though, so I’m probably better off reading more sarcastic passages and getting more used to recognizing that the speaker is actually saying the opposite of what they explicitly write down (reading in between the lines?). I should probably work on my satire piece too…. Anyone want to offer tips on how to be less gullible and more sardonic?
I guess what I also realized was that time management could also be an issue on both multiple choice and essay parts if one wasn’t always keenly aware of the time. Or maybe it’s just me and my over worrying, but it did take a while to focus and read through the passages and answer all the questions and I felt lucky to have had a bit of time in the end to go back and check on my answers.
And then with the essays, I think one aspect I struggled with was not organizing the paragraphs around literary techniques but rather ideas. For the last essay, where we have to pick a book from the list they give us to analyze, I feel like it’s also probably not a super good idea to organize everything by chronological order in the book because I think you often fall too easily into the trap of book summarization if you do that. Instead one might want to figure out the ideas supporting your thesis and pick various example events from the book and then discuss them all in one paragraph and how they support the idea that supports the thesis. Another difficult aspect about the last essay question is I think deciding which novel to write about. Because as we discussed in class, even though Iago and Othello are good choices for the last mentor-main character question we had, they are also probably the most common choices (lol I’m guilty of picking them too… but it was just so much easier & solid to back up) and picking other less written about choices could be to one’s advantage. So there’s the debate of which would be more easier to write about and which would be the more unique different choice…
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