The arguments AP Language students read most, from the Declaration of Independence to Civil Disobedience. Each guide names the claim and the rhetorical situation, walks the line of reasoning, explains the rhetorical choices, and ends with a practice prompt. Public-domain texts are here in full. See also the AP Language study station.
In Swift’s anonymous 1729 satire, a calm, statistical speaker proposes selling the babies of Ireland’s poor as food, a standard text for studying verbal irony and a speaker who is not the author.
Asked to speak on women and fiction, Woolf argues that a woman needs money and a room of her own to write, and invents Shakespeare’s sister to show what happens without them.
Reagan’s Oval Office address on the day Challenger was lost mourns seven astronauts, comforts the children who watched, and promises that American space exploration will go on.
Truth spoke at an Ohio women’s rights convention in 1851; this page prints the two reports that preserve the speech, the one published three weeks later and the famous version published twelve years after.
Plato’s version of the speech Socrates gave at his trial for impiety and corrupting the young: a defense of a life spent questioning people, which ends in a death sentence.
Thoreau argues that conscience outranks the law, and that a citizen who pays for a government that protects slavery and wages an unjust war shares in the wrong.
Written for the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, Stanton’s rewrite of the Declaration of Independence charges man with tyranny over woman and demands women’s full rights as citizens.
Three days before leaving office, the general who became president warns Americans that a permanent arms industry and government-funded science could gain too much power over a free country.
Sworn in at the bottom of the Great Depression, Roosevelt tells Americans that fear is the real enemy, blames the bankers, and promises action, even emergency power if Congress stalls.
Patrick Henry’s 1775 call to arms at the Virginia Convention, as William Wirt reconstructed it in 1817: hope of peace with Britain is a delusion, and the war has already begun.
Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 address at the Lincoln Memorial argues that the United States has broken its founding promise to Black citizens and pictures the nation that could keep it.
Surrounded by the U.S. Army in freezing weather in 1877, the Nez Perce leader Chief Joseph counts his dead, thinks of the freezing children, and says he will stop fighting.
Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address pledges American strength to friends, offers rivals a path to peace, and asks citizens what they will do for their country.
Jailed in Birmingham in April 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. answered eight white clergymen who called his protests ill-timed, defending nonviolent direct action and the duty to resist unjust laws.
With the Civil War nearly over, Lincoln names slavery as its cause, refuses to claim God for either side, and asks for a peace without malice.
Arrested for voting in 1872, Anthony tours two New York counties before her trial arguing she committed no crime: women are persons, persons are citizens, and the Constitution already guarantees citizens the vote.
The day after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt asked Congress to recognize a state of war in a short address built on dates, facts and the word ‘infamy’.
At a public funeral for Athens’ first war dead, Pericles spends most of his speech praising the city itself, arguing that a democracy this free and bold was worth dying for.
George Orwell’s 1946 essay argues that vague, secondhand English hides dishonest politics and makes muddled thinking easier, and that any writer can push back with a few blunt rules.
Emerson urges readers to trust their own intuition over custom, creeds and public opinion, and to stop fearing that they will contradict themselves.
George Orwell’s 1936 essay recalls a colonial policeman in Burma who kills a working elephant he does not want to kill, because a watching crowd expects it of him.
Edwards’s 1741 revival sermon holds unconverted listeners over the pit of hell with images of God’s wrath, then urges them to come to Christ while the door of mercy is open.
Facing a Spanish invasion in 1588, Elizabeth I tells her army she trusts them, will live or die among them, and has “the heart and Stomach of a King.”
During the Watergate impeachment debate, Barbara Jordan sets the Framers’ own tests for impeachment beside President Nixon’s conduct and asks whether the Constitution can reach it.
Thomas Paine’s first Crisis essay, written as the Continental Army retreated across New Jersey in 1776, argues that freedom is worth its hard price and calls on every state to turn out.
Speaking to Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa Society in 1837, Emerson argues that a true scholar learns from nature, books and action, trusts his own mind, and that America must stop imitating Europe.
Congress’s 1776 case for American independence: a short statement of rights and principles, a long list of charges against the King, and a formal break with Britain.
In three short paragraphs at a cemetery dedication, Lincoln recasts the Civil War as a test of whether a nation founded on equality can survive.
A week after marchers were beaten in Selma, a Southern president told Congress to pass a voting rights law fast, and took the civil rights movement’s own words as his: ‘we shall overcome.’
Invited to give a Fourth of July address in 1852, Frederick Douglass praises the founders, then argues that for enslaved Americans the holiday exposes the nation’s hypocrisy.