Sample Summer Reading

AP English Language Name: [e-mail] mrkaplanenglish.weebly.com Date:

SUMMER READING ESSAY: SOME SAMPLE ESSAYS
Engaging with sources but addressing larger ideas
Contents
“Bumping into Mr. Ravioli: A theory of busyness, and its hero” by Adam Gopnik
Links for other professional examples
“Social Media Replaces Corporate Media” Sample Summer Reading Essay
“The Influence of Television” Sample Summer Reading Essay

Your homework assignment is to read these three samples and mark them up with insightful notes about style for class. What is Gopnik doing in each paragraph? What are his ideas, how does he shift, and why does he shift? For the student examples, assess how the students deal with the assignment.
She insisted that Charlie Ravioli was nothing to be worried about. Olivia was right on target, in fact. Most under-sevens (sixty-three per cent, to be scientific) have an invisible friend, and children create their imaginary playmates not out of trauma but out of a serene sense of the possibilities of fiction--sometimes as figures of pure fantasy, sometimes, as Olivia had done, as observations of grownup manners assembled in tranquillity and given a name. I learned about the invisible companions Taylor studied: Baintor, who is invisible because he lives in the light; Station Pheta, who hunts sea anemones on the beach. Charlie Ravioli seemed pavement-bound by comparison.
"An imaginary playmate isn 't any kind of trauma-marker," my sister said. "It 's just the opposite: it 's a sign that the child is now confident enough to begin to understand how to organize her experience into stories." The significant thing about imaginary friends, she went on, is that the kids know they 're fictional. In an instant message on AOL, she summed it up: "The children with invisible friends often interrupted the interviewer to remind her, with a certain note of concern for her sanity, that these characters were, after all, just
Read them as models of organization, as a source to add to your essay, or as something you just find interesting.

Teachers Note: This is a student’s final draft of a Summer Reading Essay from 2010. The Category was “Media Culture in America,” and the books the student read over the summer were The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, Born to Buy by Juliet Schor, and In Persuasion Nation by George Saunders.

Social Media Replaces Corporate Media

“The corporate media is out to get us, man,” laments one of my friends, a self proclaimed tortured-artist-socialist. “The ads staring us down everywhere we look, the need for buying and buying that is promoted everywhere… Just think about how much the people at the top of television companies, newspapers, or giant corporations are influencing us. [Exasperated groan] We owe our disgusting consumerist culture to these