Please note that the years below are hyperlinked to the relevant document/webpage.
Remember that the three free-response questions appear on the AP Language and Composition exam in the following order: Question 1 (synthesis), Question 2 (rhetorical analysis), and Question 3 (argument). So, when you click on the links below, the rhetorical analysis question will be the second one.
2023
2023 (Set 1): First Lady Michelle Obama‘s speech, in 2017, at an event honoring outstanding school counselors. (student sample responses not yet available)
2023 (Set 2): poet Rita Dove‘s commencement address, in 2016, at UVA. (student sample responses not yet available)
2022: future Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s speech, “A Latina Judge’s Voice, delivered in 2001. (student sample responses)
2021: Barack Obama‘s address, in 2013, dedicating the Rosa Parks statue in the National Statuary Hall of the United States Capitol building. (student sample responses)
2019: the conclusion to Mohandas “Mahatma” Gandhi‘s letter (1930) to Viceroy Lord Irwin, the representative of the British crown in India. (student sample responses)
2018: US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s commencement speech to the graduating class of Mount Holyoke College in 1997. (student sample responses)
2017: the opening to a speech made in 1960 by American journalist and politician Clare Boothe Luce to journalists at the Women’s National Press Club. (student sample responses)
2016: On June 11, 2004, Margaret Thatcher, the former prime minister of Great Britain, delivered a eulogy to the American people in honor of former United States president Ronald Reagan, with whom she had worked closely. (student sample responses)
2015: On the tenth anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968), labor union organizer and civil rights leader Cesar Chavez published an article in the magazine of a religious organization devoted to helping those in need. (student sample responses)
2014: Abigail Adams (1744–1818) writes a letter to her son John Quincy Adams, who is traveling abroad with his father, John Adams, a United States diplomat and later the country’s second president. (student sample responses)
2013: from Last Child in the Woods (2008) by Richard Louv, a passage about the separation between people and nature. (student sample responses)
2012: President John F. Kennedy, who had repeatedly called for stable prices and wages as part of a program of national sacrifice during a period of economic distress, held a news conference on April 11, 1962, which he opened with commentary regarding the 3.5 percent hike in steel prices the previous day by the nation’s largest steel companies. (student sample responses)
2011: American social worker and reformer Florence Kelley delivered a speech before the convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in Philadelphia on July 22, 1905. (student sample responses)
2011 (Form B): a letter from Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) to a woman who had asked him to obtain the archbishop of Canterbury’s patronage to have her son sent to the university. (student sample responses)
2010: In 1791, Benjamin Banneker, the son of former slaves, wrote to Thomas Jefferson, framer of the Declaration of Independence and secretary of state to President George Washington, to argue against slavery. (student sample responses)
2010 (Form B): The Horizontal World, Debra Marquart’s 2006 memoir about growing up in North Dakota. (student sample responses)
2009: In two passages from his book The Future of Life (2002), noted contemporary scientist Edward O. Wilson satirizes the language of two groups that hold opposing attitudes about environmentalism. (student sample responses)
2009 (Form B): a passage from “The Indispensable Opposition,” an article by Walter Lippmann that appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1939. (student sample responses)
2008: in an excerpt from The Great Influenza, an account of the 1918 flu epidemic, author John M. Barry writes about scientists and their research. (student sample responses)
2008 (Form B): a passage from “America Needs Its Nerds” by Leonid Fridman (in the New York Times, 1990). (student sample responses)
2007: in a passage from Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World (1993), Scott Russell Sanders responds to an essay by Salman Rushdie, a writer who left his native India for England. (student sample responses)
2007 (Form B): a speech delivered in 1861 by Wendell Phillips, a prominent white American abolitionist. (student sample responses)
NB: Before 2007, the AP Language and Composition exam did not include a synthesis task; instead, it presented a third free-response question that required a narrower, more-focused argument or rhetorical analysis—depending on the year.
2006: an excerpt from “On the Want of Money,” an essay written by nineteenth-century author William Hazlitt. (student sample responses)
2006 (Form B): a passage from George Bernard Shaw’s play Saint Joan in which the Inquisitor argues his case against Joan, a young French woman on trial in a church court for allegedly spreading heresy (beliefs at variance with established religious doctrine). (student sample responses)
2005: a mock press release in The Onion (a publication devoted to humor and satire) satirizes how products are marketed to consumers. (student sample responses, for all three questions)
2005 (Form B): a lecture delivered in Boston in 1832 by Maria W. Stewart, an African American educator and writer. (student sample responses, for all three questions)
2004: a letter written by the eighteenth-century author Lord Chesterfield to his young son, who was traveling far from home. (student sample responses)
2004 (Form B): a passage from biologist Rachel Carson’s published Silent Spring (1962), a book that helped to transform American attitudes toward the environment. (student sample responses)
2003: a speech delivered by Alfred M. Green to his fellow African Americans in Philadelphia in April 1861, the first month of the Civil War. (student sample responses)
2003 (Form B): a letter from John Downe, a weaver, to his wife in England after traveling to the United States and taking a job so that he could earn enough money to enable his wife and children to join him (1831). (student sample responses)
2002: Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, given one month before the end of the Civil War (March 4, 1865). (student sample responses)
2002 (Form B): excerpts from a crucial scene in Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar. (student sample responses)
2001: a letter written in 1866 by the English novelist Marian Evans Lewes (who used the pen name George Eliot) in response to a letter from an American woman, Melusina Fay Peirce. (student sample responses)
2000: a passage from Eudora Welty’s autobiography, One Writer’s Beginnings (1983). (student sample responses)
1999: a passage from the opening of the essay “On Seeing England for the First Time,” by Jamaica Kincaid (1992). (student sample responses)