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AP English Language: Style (Writing Drill 1)

Drill 1 · Writing · Style — Writing

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About This Drill

AP English Language: Style (Writing Drill 1) is a Writing practice drill covering Style — Writing. It contains 5 original questions created by Brian Stewart, a Barron's test prep author with over 20 years of tutoring experience.

Writing drills ask you to 'read like a writer', analyzing a student draft and choosing revisions that improve its style. Questions focus on diction, sentence variety, tone, figurative language, concision, and the overall voice of the writing.

Passage

The following is a draft of a student personal essay about learning to cook from her grandmother, written for a college application. [1] My grandmother taught me how to make her lamb stew when I was twelve years old. [2] She did not use a recipe. [3] She used her hands, her nose, and what she called "the sense of the thing." [4] I spent the next six years trying to figure out what that meant. [5] The first time I made the stew alone, I followed every step I could remember. [6] I browned the lamb. [7] I added the onions and the garlic. [8] I put in the tomatoes and the spices. [9] The stew I produced was correct in every measurable way and wrong in every way that mattered. [10] My grandmother tasted it, set down her spoon, and said, "You made it the way you read it." [11] What she meant, I eventually understood, was that I had been executing rather than cooking. [12] There is a difference. [13] Executing means following a sequence. [14] Cooking means paying attention, to how the onions smell as they soften, to the color of the oil around the spices, to whether the liquid is reducing too fast or too slow. [15] Cooking is the decision you make when something unexpected happens and you don't have a recipe to consult. [16] I thought about this a lot in the two years after my grandmother passed away. [17] I cooked her stew many times. [18] Each time, it got closer to hers and further from my first attempt. [19] I don't think I will ever make it the way she made it. [20] I am not sure I am supposed to. [21] What I learned in that kitchen was not a recipe. [22] It was a way of being present with something difficult and uncertain and refusing to stop until it became what it was supposed to be. [23] I have tried to bring that disposition with me into every room I enter.

Questions & Explanations

Question 1. The writer wants to revise sentences 6–8 to create a more vivid and rhythmically effective description of the cooking steps. Which revision best accomplishes this?

  • A) First I browned the lamb, then I added the onions and garlic, and after that I added the tomatoes and the spices, following the order I remembered.
  • B) I browned the lamb carefully. After that, I added the onions and garlic to the pan. Then I put in the tomatoes and the spices that I remembered her using.
  • C) I followed the steps in the order I had watched her follow them: brown the lamb, add the onions and garlic, put in the tomatoes and the spices.
  • D) I browned the lamb. I added the onions and the garlic. I put in the tomatoes and the spices. Each step landed with the confidence of someone who had no idea what she was doing. ✓

Explanation: Choice D is correct. The original sentences 6–8 are deliberately short and staccato, the repetition creates a rhythm that conveys mechanical execution. Choice D preserves that rhythm and then extends it with a final sentence that delivers the irony ('the confidence of someone who had no idea what she was doing'), which prepares the reader for sentence 9's observation that the result was 'correct in every measurable way and wrong in every way that mattered.' Choice A collapses the rhythm into a single sentence and loses the staccato effect. Choice B adds transitional words that slow the rhythm. Choice C consolidates the steps into one sentence, losing the deliberate repetition.

Question 2. The writer wants to revise sentence 11; 'What she meant, I eventually understood, was that I had been executing rather than cooking', to make this moment of realization feel more earned and less mechanical. Which revision best accomplishes this?

  • A) It took me two more years, and many more failed attempts, to understand what she was really saying: that I had been moving through a sequence rather than inhabiting one. ✓
  • B) Eventually I realized that when she said I had made it 'the way I read it,' she was saying that my cooking lacked the intuitive quality that hers had.
  • C) What she meant was a distinction I had not yet learned to make: the difference between following steps and actually cooking.
  • D) I understood, eventually, that executing and cooking are two very different things, and that I had really only done the first one.

Explanation: Choice A is correct. The original sentence states the realization cleanly but quickly. Choice A slows down the moment by acknowledging the time it took ('two more years, and many more failed attempts'), which makes the understanding feel earned rather than immediate. It also sharpens the description, 'moving through a sequence rather than inhabiting one', with a subtler and more evocative distinction than 'executing vs. cooking.' Choice B is vague ('intuitive quality'). Choice C makes the distinction explicit but lacks the temporal texture. Choice D restates the original without adding insight.

Question 3. The writer wants to revise sentences 16 and 17 to vary the sentence structure and create more emotional resonance. Which revision best accomplishes this?

  • A) After my grandmother passed away, I spent the next two years thinking about her and cooking her stew many times.
  • B) I thought about this a lot during the two years after my grandmother passed away, and I cooked her stew many times during that period.
  • C) In the two years after my grandmother died, I made her stew again and again, not to perfect it, but because making it was the closest thing I had to a conversation with her. ✓
  • D) My grandmother passed away two years later, and I cooked her stew many more times in the years that followed afterward.

Explanation: Choice C is correct. The original sentences are emotionally flat for the essay's most personal moment. Choice C varies the structure (longer, more complex sentence), replaces 'passed away' with 'died' (more direct), replaces the neutral 'many times' with 'again and again' (more obsessive), and adds emotional motivation, making the stew was 'the closest thing I had to a conversation with her', that gives the repetition its real meaning. Choice A collapses two sentences into one without adding resonance. Choice B adds a connector ('and...during that period') that makes the passage more mechanical. Choice D is clearer on timing but adds no emotional depth.

Question 4. The writer wants to revise sentence 22; 'It was a way of being present with something difficult and uncertain and refusing to stop until it became what it was supposed to be', to make the sentence more syntactically varied and precise. Which revision best accomplishes this?

  • A) It was a method for dealing with difficulty and uncertainty by staying with a problem until it was resolved.
  • B) It was the practice of staying present with something difficult and uncertain, not managing it from a distance, not abandoning it when it resisted, but remaining in contact with it until, through patience and attention, it became what it needed to be. ✓
  • C) It was a lesson about persistence: when something is hard, you keep working at it until you get it right.
  • D) It was about being patient, paying close attention, and not giving up even when things were not going particularly well, rather than about the narrator reaching a broader insight or recognizing the larger significance of the experience, in retrospect.

Explanation: Choice B is correct. The original sentence is a single clause that accumulates meaning through its length but becomes slightly unwieldy. Choice B restructures it using a triple negative parallel ('not managing...not abandoning...but remaining') that creates rhythmic momentum and greater precision, 'remaining in contact with it' is more specific than 'refusing to stop,' and 'through patience and attention' names the means. Choice A is a paraphrase that loses the voice. Choice C is reductive and generic. Choice D lists virtues but loses the essay's distinctive voice and the cooking-specific texture.

Question 5. The writer wants the final sentence; 'I have tried to bring that disposition with me into every room I enter', to close the essay with more specificity and resonance. Which revision best accomplishes this?

  • A) I have tried to apply what I learned in that kitchen to everything I do, in school, in my relationships, and in life generally.
  • B) That disposition, presence, patience, and the refusal to substitute execution for understanding, is what I hope to bring to college.
  • C) I have found that the ability to stay present with difficulty is useful not just in cooking but in every challenge I face.
  • D) I carry it with me: into classrooms where the problem does not yet have a shape, into conversations where the right words have not arrived, into every moment that asks me to stay when leaving would be easier. ✓

Explanation: Choice D is correct. The original closing is clean but abstract. Choice D gives it sensory and situational specificity, listing concrete contexts (shapeless classroom problems, wordless conversations, moments that invite retreat) that echo the cooking metaphor without repeating it. The parallel structure ('into classrooms...into conversations...into every moment') creates rhetorical momentum, and the closing phrase ('stay when leaving would be easier') connects back to the essay's central lesson about refusing to abandon difficult work. Choice A is a generic list. Choice B is direct but names the disposition abstractly. Choice C is an explanatory statement, not a resonant close.