Inquiry Based Arguments — AP Lang. 2016

So by now you have a draft of your argument completed…but is it ready for publication? Have you fully engaged in the revision process to the best of your ability?

Consider the following before you put your thoughts out into the world:

1. Is your piece something someone else would want to read?
2. Is there an audience for your essay?
3. How engaging is your opening sentence? opening paragraph? etc.
4. How genuine is your line of inquiry? Does your writing voice demonstrate your genuine interest in your own position and thinking?
5. Are you reporting information from your research or truly synthesizing your research into an original, authentic argument?
6. How are you documenting your research for your readers? How does your use of source material influence your credibility with your readers?
7. How effective is the structure of your writing?
8. Why should we care about what you have to say?
9. Has anyone else read your work?

Finding your audience:

You also should consider how to find your readers and how your readers may find you. A part of publishing in the digital age is planning and using tags and key terms to help connect your story and your audience. Medium, like many other forms of digital communities sets up a running feed based on your preselected interests and categories of tags. When you are ready to publish your story, you will be given options to add up to three tags. Consider what terms will connect your story to interested readers and tag accordingly. For our organizational purposes make sure you add the tag FHSAPLANG to all stories published for the sake of this class.

We also expect you to link your writing to other forms of social media in order to spread the word that you’ve got some published work. The more readers you get, the more momentum you gain and the more authentic the writing experience becomes.