How to Pick a Side for the AP Lang Synthesis Essay

You can’t start answering Question 1 until you’ve taken a stance!

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It’s easy to take a side on an issue when you’ve never heard a convincing argument for the other side.

It’s also easy to shrug and say you can’t pick a side because there are good arguments for both.

It’s harder to truly listen to both sides and take an informed stance.

If you know what this sophistication of thought looks like, the synthesis essay on the AP Lang exam is your place to demonstrate it. It’s also your place to demonstrate you know how to consult sources and how to organize a coherent essay, but none of that matters much until you decide what you’re going to argue. This is the stage where many students feel paralyzed, yet AP Lang essay guides often take it for granted.

To decide which side to pick, you’ll need to approach the sources with the right mindset — a mindset that could help you “pick a side” in issues beyond AP Lang.

Step One: Know What’s Being Argued

First, fully read each document. Don’t imagine a scoreboard to tally the “points” for each side. Instead, ask yourself, What information here could help someone make a more informed argument about the issue than they could’ve before reading this? No matter which side you’re defending, you should understand the objective facts of the issue and the different perspectives people have on it — your argument strategy depends on them.

• Passages: I recommend reading an entire passage before deciding which lines to quote-mine. When taken out of context, a sentence might not really mean what you think it means at first glance, especially if it’s early in the passage. After one round of careful reading, start to finish, go back to skim for the lines you find the most informative. Underline them so you can easily find them.
• Charts, Statistics, and Most Other Image-Based Sources: This kind of source doesn’t have an agenda. Whether we ultimately agree on one side or the other, the information here will be true either way. The world would look different if it weren’t true. (Now is not the time to nitpick the credibility of the source; assume it’s reliable.) Even if it doesn’t sway your stance, you’ve still learned from it. It might come in handy for greater context in your introduction or conclusion. Note what you’ve learned, what its implications are, and what each “side” would think of this fact.
• Political Cartoons: This source doesn’t factually teach you much about the issue, but it does teach you what some people really feel about it. You could point to this source in order to point to that attitude, whether you end up backing up that attitude with facts or refuting it. What is that attitude, specifically?

Step Two: Find the Most Convincing Point

By now, you’ve identified evidence for both sides — it’s tempting to try to weigh them and see which side looks stronger. That’s a lot to mentally juggle, especially when you’ve been exposed to a great deal of new information. I recommend starting smaller.

Judge which source makes the strongest point.

Chances are, there’s one source that persuades you the most: one that provides the most relevant insight, one that’s the most damning to the other side’s claim, one that highlights the biggest impact on the issue’s stakeholders. Remember, the College Board is trying its best to represent both sides fairly, so whichever side that point lands on is probably the side you’ll ultimately want to defend.

Once you’ve decided, think of other points that could make you even more confident that you’re on the right side, whether they’re in the other sources or from your own head.

Step Three: Respond to the Other Side

Here’s a childish mentality you’ll often see in sociopolitical discourse: I know my side is right, so any arguments made by the other side must somehow be wrong.

Of course, maybe an argument on the other side is factually wrong. People aren’t always diligent about fact-checking. But remember, a specific argument used for your own side might be wrong too. Either way, this probably isn’t the case for the carefully selected sources on the AP exam.

What’s more likely is that a point on the opposing side is right, but it’s given exaggerated importance in the grand scheme of things:

• Maybe switching to your preferred side would be costly…but keeping the status quo would actually end up costing more.
• Maybe there would be an upsetting transition period that some people don’t want to deal with…but you could compare it to cases in the past where a difficult transition period eventually led to a better state.
• Maybe people sentimentally enjoy the old way for tradition’s sake…but there was an even older way that nobody’s trying to go back to now; clearly, we have to adapt to change.
• Maybe there is a real downside to your preferred policy…but a new policy can deal with that downside.

If you can come up with a compelling “yes, but…” statement, your argument will sound much stronger than one that never mentions the other side’s view at all.

Notice that low-scoring essayists seldom do this. They write too little, thinking quotes extracted from the sources will speak for themselves. You want to show that as much as you’ve been informed by the sources, you haven’t outsourced your thinking to them — your stance is truly your own.

Altogether, if you remember this three-step process,

• Get informed about the issue by carefully reading all the sources
• Pick the strongest point and support it even further
• Thoughtfully respond to points on the other side

…you’ll have plenty to write. Time to start planning!