Excerpts: Why they’re overlooked and how to use them to raise your AP scores

When College Board redesigned the AP Lit course and exam in 2019, they introduced a new kind of unit to the course called Short Fiction. Most people assume that short fiction refers exclusively to short stories. However, you won’t find a short story on the AP English Lit exam. In addition to short stories, short fiction refers to the study of excerpts. In fact, the AP English Lit exam contains ONLY excerpts when it comes to prose.

I believe that excerpt analysis is the greatest skill missing from the recommended activities in the CED. Ever since I have started emphasizing excerpt analysis in my classes, my students’ autonomy has gone up, as have their AP scores! Here are several strategies and activities to help your students study excerpts for the AP Lit exam.

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Cold Reads

Cold reading is the study of a text without any preparation or context. Students are forced to identify character, plot, conflict, and other skills with a cold read. Essentially, it is what students must do on the AP Lit exam and other standardized tests.

There is no magical activity needed for a cold read, just two crucial tasks. First, students must annotate. This is crucial because there will always be one student who provides an outlandish interpretation of the text, often going on “vibes” alone. Annotating the text requires students to gather evidence to back up any interpretations they have. (With the exam going digital next year, there will be digital tools for annotating the text on a screen.)

Secondly, students must discuss. My students sit in small groups of 3 or 4. When they finish annotating, I ask them to discuss in small groups what is happening in the text. This small group discussion usually weeds out any ridiculous theories and can help struggling readers make connections they might not see on their own.

Using context details as gradual clues

Studying a prose excerpt without context can be overwhelming. However, it is the context that needs to eventually be taken away in time for the exam. To start, I like giving students some context before reading a prose excerpt—but I don’t give it until they earn it!

In my AP Lit class, our second prose unit is a skill-based study of excerpts. In our lesson on syntax, I ask students to read a page from Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. This is an incredibly difficult excerpt, because Hemingway discusses characters with little exposition or background details, plus I take a portion from the middle of the novel.

In our lesson, I ask students to annotate the text for syntactic choices. Then, I ask a few questions to get them thinking about the meaning of the plot. However, after a few questions, I provide this context:

Contextual information: The narrator is Jake Barnes, a former American soldier who sustained a devastating war injury. Because of it, Jake is impotent. The author never explains this in the novel, but implies it. Jake is traveling through Spain to watch bull-fighting with Brett, the woman he loves, and her fiancé, as well as one of her former suitors who has not given up on her.

This information usually brings about a lot of “Ohhhhs,” as most students can’t even figure out that Brett is a girl. And that isn’t their fault! It’s a difficult book and they were thrown in the middle of it! But now that they have this information, students go back and reread the portion they read before, making new deductions and inferences from the text. Then they finish the questions I ask and begin analyzing the skill associated with the text.

I could tell students about Jake’s injury and Brett’s identity at the beginning of the excerpt, but that information may not always be available on a prose excerpt. I like to see how much students deduce on a cold read before giving them context hints.

Voice Lessons

In 2000, Nancy Dean published her popular book Voice Lessons. The book and its exercises have become a fixture in AP Lit and Lang classes. In it, students study mentor sentences and paragraphs and analyze them for skills.

Another way to consider voice lessons is to apply it to whole excerpts of prose. I created my own version of voice lessons with short excerpts of various books. Each week, I tell the students a bit about the selected author and genre. Then, I read the excerpt aloud. When I finish, students discuss two things in small groups:

1. What tones and tone shifts are present in the text?
2. What writing strategies does the author use in the text?

Consider this voice lesson from Where the Crawdads Sing:

1969

Marsh is not swamp. Marsh is a space of light, where grass grows in water, and water flows into the sky. Slow-moving creeks wander, carrying the orb of the sun with them to the sea, and long-legged birds lift with unexpected grace—as though not built to fly—against the roar of a thousand snow geese. Then within the marsh, here and there, true swamp crawls into low-lying bogs, hidden in clammy forests. Swamp water is still and dark, having swallowed the light in its muddy throat. Even night crawlers are diurnal in this lair. There are sounds, of course, but compared to the marsh, the swamp is quiet because decomposition is cellular work. Life decays and reeks and returns to the rotted duff; a poignant wallow of death begetting life.

On the morning of October 30, 1969, the body of Chase Andrews lay in the swamp, which would have absorbed it silently, routinely. Hiding it for good. A swamp knows all about death, and doesn’t necessarily define it as tragedy, certainly not a sin. But this morning two boys from the village rode their bikes out to the old fire tower and, from the third switchback, spotted his denim jacket.

Students usually remark on the unusual narrative perspective, which seems detached from a character in the text. They describe the first paragraph as being filled with natural imagery and a tone of fondness for the marsh. The second paragraph personifies the swamp as a bystander or more in the death of Chase Andrews. Finally, the structure of the text is interesting. It begins with a date preceding the text, which means it may be a flashback or setting up an event in a plot line.

Once we discuss the tones and writing strategies, I challenge the students to write a piece of creative writing that uses the same strategies. I know that creative writing activities in AP Lit are a little unconventional, but this unit has been a favorite among my students for years! Check out the unit here if you want to learn more!

Here are a few other ideas for working prose excerpt practice into your classes.

First Chapter Fridays

First Chapter Fridays work kind of like my voice lesson activity, but without the creative writing expectation. Simply read the first chapter (or the first few pages) of a new novel and discuss the prose strategies being used to start a story. This also works for engaging students in new novels for independent reading!

Prose Essay Questions

I love to use released questions from past exams for our prose excerpt analysis. Some of my favorite excerpts for analysis are:

• People of the Whale by Linda Hogan (2022)
• The Blithedale Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne (2018)
• Fasting, Feasting by Anita Desai (2008)
• The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy (1999)

Short Stories

Although both lumped in with short fiction, we know that short stories are not the same as excerpts. However, many short stories are structured in a way that still requires deduction and inferences like a prose excerpt. Here are some of my favorite challenging short stories that can help strengthen excerpt analysis:

• “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid
• “Hills Like White Elephants” by Ernest Hemingway
• “There Will Come Soft Rains” by Ray Bradbury
• “A & P” by John Updike
• “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin

Conclusion

I hope you get some ideas for integrating prose excerpt analysis into your course this year. Whether you use some of my resources or create your own, I think you’ll find your students will feel more confident and your test scores will improve!

I’d love to hear more ideas for strengthening prose analysis skills. Please feel free to leave a comment below!