Synthesis & Argument unit test

AP Lang essay rubric

Sophistication in practice

The argument essay has no sources

Row-by-row scoring, briefly

Minimum source requirement

Rhetorical analysis: the actual task

Time per essay

Writing legibly and completing

Avoiding the strawman on the exam

Handling the visual source

Qualifying rather than picking a side

Nuance and qualification

SYNTHESIS ESSAY (6 points). Over the twentieth century, the automobile reshaped where Americans live, how their cities are built, and how they move through them. Cities were rebuilt around driving, and the consequences — for mobility, for neighborhoods, for air quality, and for public budgets — remain contested. Write an essay that synthesizes material from at least three of the six sources and develops your position on what considerations should guide cities as they decide how much to build around the automobile. The six sources, summarized in our own words: SOURCE A — The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 (statute). The act authorized construction of a 41,000-mile National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, with the federal government paying ninety percent of construction costs from a Highway Trust Fund financed by fuel taxes. Its stated justifications included the movement of military traffic and the rapid evacuation of cities in the event of nuclear attack. It set engineering standards — controlled access, wide lanes, gentle grades — that made the resulting roads incompatible with the street grids of the cities they entered. SOURCE B — Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). Jacobs, a journalist and activist writing against the urban renewal orthodoxy of her time, argues that city vitality depends on dense, mixed-use, short-block neighborhoods where many people are on the street at many hours. She contends that expressways driven through such districts do not merely displace residents but destroy the conditions that make a neighborhood work, and that planners systematically misunderstand cities because they evaluate them as pictures rather than as functioning organisms. SOURCE C — Lewis Mumford, "The Highway and the City" (essay, 1958). Mumford, an architecture critic and historian, argues that highway building operates on a logic that guarantees its own expansion: new capacity attracts traffic that fills it, prompting demands for more capacity. He objects that the program was undertaken with almost no public deliberation about alternatives and that a transportation system designed around a single mode leaves those who cannot drive without any means of getting anywhere. SOURCE D — U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey, commuting mode share, 2019. Of American workers, approximately 76 percent drove to work alone, about 9 percent carpooled, about 5 percent used public transportation, about 3 percent walked or cycled, and about 6 percent worked from home. The public transportation share exceeded 30 percent in only a small number of metropolitan areas. SOURCE E — The Clean Air Act Amendments of 1970 and 1990 (statute). The 1970 amendments established national ambient air quality standards and directed the newly created Environmental Protection Agency to set emission limits for new motor vehicles, requiring a ninety percent reduction in specified pollutants. Subsequent amendments tightened the standards further and phased out leaded gasoline. Emissions per vehicle-mile fell dramatically over the following decades, even as total vehicle-miles traveled rose substantially. SOURCE F — Donald Shoup, The High Cost of Free Parking (2005). Shoup, an urban planning economist, argues that zoning codes requiring a minimum number of parking spaces per building impose an enormous hidden cost: the land and construction devoted to parking is paid for in higher rents and prices by everyone, including people who do not drive, while the parking itself is given away at no charge. He contends that free curb parking encourages drivers to circle looking for spaces, generating congestion, and proposes market-priced curb parking with revenue returned to the neighborhoods that generate it.