AP Lit - Prose Prompt - All The Living (CE Morgan)
The following essay is meant as a study guide only and definitely is not an invitation to cheat. With that said, feel free to borrow from it, paraphrase it, and adopt ideas from it that you like. Sometimes the best way to learn to write well is to read how someone else might have written a response to the same prompt. For many of the AP students I interact with, the primary challenge is learning to form an argument that builds on itself in a logical way. You may find reading my response helps you formulate a strategy for answering the prompt. Learning to integrate evidence in a way that makes sense to the argument is another key skill that can boost an essay score. Read this carefully and see how it compares to your own writing.
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Last reminder; if you're doing a "cut and paste" with this essay then that's plagiarism and that can have huge consequences. Plus, your AP teacher will know. Trust me. They know your writing, your voice, and they know when you turn in an essay that doesn't sound like you.
Any person's experiences are, like the person themselves, complex. Thus for C.E. Morgan’s description of Aloma’s experiences, in the excerpt from All the Living, to give the reader the sense of her complex emotions, the description itself must be nuanced. Morgan employs tone, imagery, and figurative language to give that nuanced description of the combination of hope, loss, loneliness, indifference, and fear that Aloma experiences.
Morgan accentuates and illustrates Aloma’s various emotional reactions by mirroring them in the tone of the writing. In a fashion that is probably common to a 12 year old girl, the first paragraph has a casual, nonchalant tone that seems to say “whatever”. The subject matter being described is serious, being sent away from her family must be traumatic, yet the tone of the narrative is so matter of fact as to be dismissive. In lines 29-50 the tone changes significantly. No longer having a faux lightness, the tone matches Aloma’s sense of oppressed claustrophobia. The diction creates weight and fear in this section. Finally the tone changes to something more hopeful, then to a kind of rebelliousness. Starting at line 51 Aloma has a realization about the potential and the freedom that adulthood would bring. The tone matches this realization with a kind of hopefulness. In the last paragraph Aloma again recalls the time before she left for her new school. This time though, rather than sounding flippant or dismissive, the tone takes on a kind of impatient determination. While the tone mirrors, and thus illustrates, Aloma’s emotional state, it is the use of imagery and figurative language that help create the tone.
The excerpt illustrates the way figurative language can add context and meaning to a description of a character's emotions. In lines 8-10 Aloma describes her aunt and uncle dismissing her from their home as being “gentle as doctors”, with a tone that said “this won’t hurt a bit”. The irony, and sarcasm, of that simile is brought home to the reader as they realize just how painful this moment was for Aloma and the clinical way it was handled. In lines 36-38 the tone takes on darker hues that are assisted by the description of her uncle’s trailer as being like an “aluminum finger”, and its relationship to the limestone wall as being “bone on bone”. In line 45 a mountain that blocked the sun and extended the darkness is described as being like a “curtain of earth”. In each instance that Morgan used figurative language they helped to establish the tone. The figurative language also overlapped with the use of imagery to help shape the tone of the excerpt.
Imagery abounds in Aloma’s description, supporting the figurative language and shaping the tone in a way that lends clarity to her complex emotional experience. Beginning at lines 28-29 the imagery shapes the narrative in the reader's mind. The image of neatly stacked cartoon magazines under a steel framed bed neatly illustrate the lonely, spartan lifestyle Aloma leads at the mission school. In the third paragraph, as Aloma lets the reader see how dark a time in her life this was, the narrative is filled with images of deep cleavages between mountains, mountains that “threated up over them all”, and created a “chasmed world” that offered little light or hope. Images of light and sun themselves become a metaphor that represent Aloma’s freedom. The imagery throughout also gives the reader a sense of how Aloma’s youth was close to nature. The language frequently evokes nature with images like her aunt's fingers “spidering up and down” the piano keys that create “woody” lows.
Aloma’s complex reaction is illustrated through the use of tone, figurative language, and imagery. The reader can see that she experienced her move to the new school with emotions that ranged from denial to acceptance, and from depression to angry determination.