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.

Emphasizes the writing of formal expository and argumentative essays and provides an introduction to basic research techniques. The study of rhetorical principles and analysis of sample essays are among the methods used to assist students to write clear, unified, coherent papers about interesting topics for specific audiences. In class workshops are utilized to help students acquire a greater control of methods of development, apt vocabulary, mature sentence structure, and standard English usage.