The AP English Language and Composition course is designed to help students become skilled readers of prose written in a variety of periods, disciplines, and rhetorical contexts and to become skilled writers who can compose for a variety of purposes. By their writing and reading in this course, students should become aware of the interactions among a writer's purposes, audience expectations, and subjects, as well as the way generic conventions and the resources of language contribute to effective writing.

This course develops effective written communication knowledge, skills, and abilities by approaching writing as a process consciously controlled and changed by the writer to meet goals and objectives in various personal, academic, and professional contexts. This course progressively builds writing expertise from basic composition to argumentation with emphasis on organization, clarity, sentence structure and fluency, sensitivity to audience and purpose, and construction of a logical progression of ideas in development and support of an idea, opinion, or thesis.