AP English Literature study guide
AP English Literature · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
AP English Literature and Composition is a College Board Advanced Placement course and exam that assesses how well students analyze imaginative literature - prose fiction, drama, and poetry - and how effectively they build written arguments about it. It is designed for high school students who have done college-level work in close reading and literary interpretation, and it is typically taken after a year of the AP course, though the exam is open to any prepared student. The exam is fully digital: students answer multiple-choice and free-response questions in the Bluebook testing app, and all responses are submitted automatically when time expires. Section I presents five sets of questions, each preceded by a passage of prose fiction, drama, or poetry, and always includes at least two prose fiction passages and at least two poetry passages. Topics on this exam: Section I: Multiple Choice and Section II: Free Response. The AP English Literature study guide has 2 sections and about 758 words.
01Section I: Multiple Choice - Reading Poetry and Prose
The multiple-choice section asks you to read unfamiliar poems and prose passages closely and answer questions about what the text says, how it is built, and why the writer made those choices . You are not tested on memorized literary history; you are tested on evidence-based reading. The core concepts are: diction (word choice and connotation), imagery and figurative language (metaphor, simile, personification, symbol), tone and mood , speaker vs. narrator (and point of view), structure (line breaks, stanza shifts, sentence rhythm, paragraph turns), syntax , and characterization .
372 words, about 2 min02Section II: Free Response - The Three Essays
The free-response section asks for three essays in two hours : a poetry analysis , a prose fiction analysis , and a literary argument responding to a thematic prompt using a work of your choosing. Graders reward a defensible thesis , well-chosen textual evidence , commentary that explains how the evidence supports the claim , and control of language . They do not reward plot summary, name-dropping, or length for its own sake. For the analysis essays: thesis construction , close reading (quotation and paraphrase tied to technique), organizing by idea rather than by chronology , and linking technique to meaning .
386 words, about 2 min