The point

"Very confusing", "goes everywhere", or, worst of all, "mathematical poetry", is how some bucket my writing style.

Believe it or not, I didn't just score a 5 on my AP Language & Composition exam; I scored a 5 while ignoring five multiple choice questions[3] & leaving an entire essay blank, requiring a near perfect run on the questions I properly answered[0].

No, I'm not here to boast or establish ethos[1]; I look to share my thoughts on two other AP Lang ideas, sophistication & line of reasoning, through my experience as an English student.

On my essays, my English teachers would commonly comment that I have great ideas, but they lose me somewhere, or a section is left unconnected. I was always so frustrated that others could not walk the bridges for which I provided blueprints; my ego-inflated high schooler reaction was equally "are they stupid?" as it was "am I stupid?", the 2-cyclic inquiry group paralyzing my writing complexity development.

When AP Lang rolled around, I didn't just get absolutely trampled by the English sweats in the relatively-scored class assignments; I somehow never managed to exit my teacher's emotional minefield unscathed, contributing to my subpar assignment grades and subsequently my continual self-doubt as a capable essayist.

But for the first time, I felt like my suffering was understood when my English teacher defined line of reasoning, something I clearly lacked this whole time. Though this label identified what it was I was missing, a straightforward pre-carved path with no skips nor implications, it did not at all help me figure out how to fill the gaps in my writings.

When she introduced sophistication as your own "writing style" or personality, something we had to make up if she deemed we hadn't naturally developed one, and that it was a notoriously challenging point to get on the essay questions in the exam, I knew I was screwed. Unlike my classmates[2], I hadn't even cracked the first code of stringing together a set of ideas to produce a coherent message.

Having to repetitively debug my essays to adhere to this line of reasoning concept, I noticed my version of essay revision was soley drawing the lines between unconnected ideas. The problem with this strategy was hitting the word limit, as I never accounted for the extra bridges I'd have to build in the revision phase. That's when an idea hit me: why not just develop the whole essay like that? Pretty trivial, pretty common, but untested by me at the time, I started practicing by writing all my ideas down and drawing edges between the ones I knew how to connect. In practice, I could be physically writing the conclusion, introduction, and second body paragraph all at once, switching mid-sentence, even mid-word, until the very last second when everything would finally connect (like Kruskal's Algorithm). Respecting word limits posed a threat no longer, as I'd already pre-build the structure in my head, where I could estimate wordcount and re-evaluate accordingly.

However, I had yet to put thought into developing my style for the sophistication point.

Fast forward to the exam, by the time I started my second essay (argumentative, skipping rhetorical analysis), I knew there was no time to get to anything else. By sheer miracle, maybe divine intervention, the open response question requested we take a stance on the validity of Colin Powell's quote: "At some point, before we can have every possible fact in hand, we have to decide. The key is not to make quick decisions, but to make timely decisions."

At that very moment, I had one of my most important epiphanies: sophistication is just a measurement of my thoughts in reaction to the prompt, the catch being the observer can only consume the words I choose to submit to them.

As scenarios to explore the quote, I wrote on my timely decisions within the exam where I emphasized quality over quantity of my responses (skipping questions I couldn't properly answer in time[3]) to optimize for score & the value a reader can extract, and on my writing style, where I designate most time to generating powerful ideas, graphing the segues between them to ensure line of reasoning, & dropping the less significant vertices to adhere to word/time limit, all before I write my first word.

Sophistication is a very real concept, the bottlneck to achieving it differing case by case: sometimes it's capturing & communicating ideas, while other times it's the ideas themselves. Though my support for the validity of Powell's quote was backed by simple arguments, they were thorough and real: undeniably quality thoughts that could not be misinterpreted. Four years older, I reframe sophisitcation as depth, but equally breadth. It's not personality nor lexical flare; it's how powerful your graph of ideas is, evaluated by the content of the vertices themselves & how you draw the edges.

Having a line of reasoning means you took something and mapped it to (also likely flattening it to) one dimension. Though a line of reasoning is the norm for transferring thoughts without losing too much meaning, I would hope no abstract thought nor its respective wielder could be fully encapsulated by a single string of finite characters.

Thus, my website is designed to act as not a line but a graph of reasoning. There exist edges everywhere via hyperlinks in keywords, connecting ideas between pages. The rest of my essays may contain tangents and even have disjoint ideas living adjacent to each other, but that's okay because my thoughts are not meant to have an order.

Truly ironic how I was chasing a line of reasoning & sophistication point.

[0] To put that into perspective, the cutoff for a 5 is usually around 74%, a single essay is worth 18.33%, and a multiple choice question is worth 1%, making 77% an upper bound for my maximum score => I needed ~96% accuracy

[1] a vertex from the AP Lang statement piece, the rhetorical triangle; credibility

[2] notably a highly technical aspiring lawyer, an alt bi Cali-native, the scholarly student athlete, and a guinea pig & tiny house -loving bassoonist polymath

[3] You're wondering why I didn't guess on those five multiple choice questions. Well I actually guessed (c) initially, but ended up erasing my guesses for the sake of the argument in my last essay