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Official AP Writing Practice

Free AP® writing practice with comprehensive progress reports for you and immediate feedback for students that guides them towards mastery of sentence-level skills.

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Sentence-Level Writing Practice

Identify which sentence-level skills your students need to practice with a skills survey. Then, assign activities recommended for each student based on their responses so they can practice and improve their proficiency with those skills.

AP Writing Skills Survey

AP Writing Skills Survey

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Students complete a 17 item survey to gauge their understanding of key writing skills that are essential to successful AP- and SAT-level writing. After students complete the survey, Quill will automatically recommend up to seven activity packs for each student based on their needs. Each pack contains a series of activities that each take about 15 minutes to complete and provide scaffolded, sequenced practice with one of the skills covered by the survey.

Skills

Complex Sentences; relative clauses; appositive phrases; participial phrases; parallel structure; compound-complex sentences; advanced combining

ELL Writing Skills Surveys

If you have ELLs in your courses, you may want to consider assigning them an ELL Skills Surveys before assigning them a writing skills survey.

ELL Starter Skills Survey

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ELL students complete a 22 item survey to gauge their mastery of foundational English grammar. This survey is most appropriate for students who are in the Entering or Emerging WIDA levels. After students complete the survey, Quill will automatically recommend up to five activity packs for each student based on their needs. Each pack contains a series of activities that each take about 15 minutes to complete and provide scaffolded, sequenced practice with one of the skills covered by the survey.

Skills

Simple verb conjugation; articles; simple subject-verb agreement; simple word order; singular and plural nouns; adjective placement

ELL Intermediate Skills Survey

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ELL students complete a 23 item survey to gauge their mastery of English grammar. This survey is most appropriate for students who are in the Emerging or Developing WIDA levels. After students complete the survey, Quill will automatically recommend up to six activity packs for each student based on their needs. Each pack contains a series of activities that each take about 15 minutes to complete and provide scaffolded, sequenced practice with one of the skills covered by the survey.

Skills

Subject-verb agreement; singular possessive nouns; possessive pronouns; prepositions; future tense; articles; intermediate questions

ELL Advanced Skills Survey

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ELL students complete a 23 item survey to gauge their mastery of English grammar, specifically in areas that are challenging for non-native English speakers. This survey is most appropriate for students who are in the Developing or Expanding WIDA levels. After students complete the survey, Quill will automatically recommend up to five activity packs for each student based on their needs. Each pack contains a series of activities that each take about 15 minutes to complete and provide scaffolded, sequenced practice with one of the skills covered by the survey.

Skills

Regular and irregular past tense; progressive tenses; phrasal verbs; choosing between prepositions; responding to questions; commonly confused words

A recommended activity pack report showing four students being recommended a mixture of activities for relative clauses and participial phrases.

Personalized Recommendations

After students complete the AP Writing Skills Survey, you'll receive recommendations for each student based on their responses and tailored to their individual needs. Each student will be recommended up to 45 sentence combining activities, grouped by concept into seven packs, that provide meaningful, targeted practice. You can assign all the activities with one click, or you can pick and choose.

Writing with Targeted Feedback

Students receive immediate feedback that guides them through the revision process, pushing them to think critically about their writing and make revisions that ultimately lead to strong, sophisticated, and grammatically accurate sentences. The feedback inspires students to strengthen their sentence structure, but also supports them in editing for mechanics such as punctuation and spelling.

An illustration showing a student combining two sentences, getting feedback from Quill, and then getting a correct response.
A report showing that a student scored 79% on parallel structure, 98% on parallel structure with joining words, and 58% on advanced parallel structure.

Data Reports

You can monitor the progress of your students and continue to identify areas of need and areas of strength through multiple data reports. Use the analysis report to review your students' work sentence-by-sentence, or use the summary report to get a high-level sense of where your students could use some extra support.

Quill and College Board have partnered to provide students with meaningful practice of their sentence-level writing skills.

Message from College Board

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Teaching writing is hard. Even harder can be attempting to pinpoint exactly when we learned how and why to write clearly. That's why the College Board has worked with Quill.org to ensure that this new, free, comprehensive offering helps students practice targeted sentence construction skills in their writing. Sustained practice and exposure to targeted skills is important to improvement and comfort.

Teaching writing may always be hard, but student practice in meaningful skills can make the learning that much clearer. Through this practice, students can begin to own the how and why of their writing.

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Questions and Answers

Quill is a writing tool that provides over 700 writing, grammar, and proofreading activities designed to engage students in the writing process. Quill provides practice in many areas of sentence writing, from comma placement and subject-verb agreement to the use of conjunctions to convey complex relationships between ideas. In the Quill Connect tool, students practice writing different types of sentences using the evidence-based strategy of sentence combining. Students receive specific, targeted feedback on their writing that they can use to revise their work. Through these activities, students practice writing a variety of sophisticated sentences and practice conveying complex ideas in clear, succinct, and grammatically strong ways. Most activities are designed to be completed in 10-15 minutes so that you have the freedom to use them in the way that works best for your classroom.

The AP Writing Skills Survey is a survey with 17 questions on a range of writing skills. The questions ask students to combine sentences, sometimes with a direction to use a specific strategy, and sometimes without any direction (other than to combine).

Students in any AP course can benefit from the practice recommended by Quill's AP Writing Skills Survey, but the practice is probably of greatest interest to teachers of AP English Language and Composition and AP English Literature and Composition.

Quill's writing skills surveys can be used in lieu of Quill's general diagnostics. For example, an AP teacher would likely assign the AP Writing Skills Survey in lieu of the Advanced Diagnostic. Keep in mind, however, that teachers may want ELL students in AP courses to begin with one of the ELL Diagnostics instead of a writing skills survey. This article explains the differences between Quill's various diagnostics and surveys in more depth.

The Survey contains 17 questions and is designed to take about 30 minutes for students to complete.

After you have assigned the Survey and your students have completed it, Quill will show you how your students performed and provide recommendations of personalized practice activities you can digitally assign to students who need further skill development. This article explains how to find and assign those recommendations.

Depending on their performance, students will be recommended some or all of the following AP Writing Practice packs. The packs provide practice through Quill Connect, Quill's sentence combining tool. With the exception of the AP Writing - Advanced Sentence Combining pack, the activities in each pack are scaffolded to build in complexity. Here are descriptions of the packs:

AP Writing Practice - Complex Sentences

Students practice constructing complex sentences using subordinating conjunctions, such as even though, after, while, and because. Students also practice identifying time order, opposition, and cause/effect relationships.

AP Writing Practice - Relative Clauses

Students begin by using a provided relative pronoun, then progress to choosing between who, that, or which.

AP Writing Practice - Appositive Phrases

Students practice describing nouns using appositive phrases at the beginning, middle, and end of sentences.

AP Writing Practice - Participial Phrases

Students practice constructing sentences with -ing and -ed participial phrases at the beginning, middle, or end.

AP Writing Practice - Parallel Structure

Students practice constructing sentences in parallel structure with correlative conjunctions like either/or, neither/nor, and both/and, and with subordinating conjunctions like although, because, and when. Students also practice constructing sentences with parallel clauses.

AP Writing Practice - Compound-Complex Sentences

Students practice constructing compound sentences with and, or, but, and so. Students also practice constructing complex sentences with subordinating conjunctions such as even though, after, while, and because. Finally, students practice constructing compound-complex sentences with coordinating and subordinating conjunctions. Students also practice identifying time order, opposition, and cause/effect relationships.

AP Writing Practice - Advanced Combining

Students apply their knowledge of multiple sentence structures to combine the sentences in the strongest way possible. Students practice constructing compound and complex sentences, using modifying phrases and clauses, and combining predicates.

Yes! From anywhere and at any time! Again though, please note that recommendations of the AP Writing Packs are generated after students complete the AP Writing Skills Survey. Please also note that students' performance on the AP Writing Practice packs will only be recorded if they are assigned to them by their teacher.

Each AP recommended pack* contains between 4 and 7 activities, each of which are designed to take between 10 and 15 minutes each.

*Please note that the activities in the AP Writing - Advanced Combining pack are different as they are all uncued, meaning the feedback does not direct students to combine in a particular way. These are great for students who are ready to apply the strategies covered in the survey without suggestions or direction.

The focus in most of these activities is to build the target skill of the pack (appositives, relative clauses, etc.), so the vocabulary and reading level are intentionally designed to be accessible by all students.

Teacher Tip: You can preview and play through any pack and its activities to get a sense of whether it's appropriate for your students.

Yes! In each recommended practice activity, Quill provides students with immediate feedback on their writing that they can use to revise their responses up to 5 times. Through these rounds of feedback and revision, students improve the clarity and precision of their writing.

Quill has a variety of reports to help you track your students' performance and progress. In the Activity Summary report, you can quickly see which activities your students have completed, along with color-coded icons indicating their proficiency with each activity. Quill has several other reports as well. This Cheat Sheet shows you which report to go to for particular information, and this video will walk you through interpreting and utilizing three of Quill's student data reports.

You can assign all the recommended packs in one click, or you can pick and choose, revisiting the recommendations report to assign more packs as needed.

As Quill was designed to be a supplementary tool with each activity taking approximately 10-15 minutes, students are ideally completing an activity at least 1-2 times per week (at most completing one activity per day). Since each AP recommended pack contains between 4 and 7 activities, teachers generally expect a recommended pack to be completed in 1-2 weeks. Of course, students may need more or less time depending on the amount of activities in the pack, their level of difficulty, and students' level of proficiency.

This article explains how you can use deadlines to help students pace themselves.

The activities in the AP Writing Practice packs are curated from existing Quill activities. While your students may encounter an activity they have already completed, the AP Writing Practice packs have been customized to target the skills students need to write successfully at the AP level. Given the quantity and variety of activities available on Quill, chances are that the AP Writing Practice packs will include plenty of new activities, even for students who have been using Quill for a while.

Yes! Quill offers 5 different tools with more than 700 writing, grammar, and proofreading activities designed to engage students in the writing process. This article will show you how to explore and assign Quill's featured activity packs, and this article will show you how to create a custom activity pack.

It is recommended that you and your students create free accounts on Quill.org. Creating an account will give you access to the Survey and its recommended practice. Creating an account also allows you to track your students' progress and view data reports. You can create an account by visiting the Quill sign-up page.

If you do not want to create an account, you or your students can complete the Survey here. However, please note that if you do not create an account, your students' performance on the Survey will not be saved or shared with you, and you will not have access to the recommended skills practice. You will also not be able to track student progress or view data reports.

We are here for you! The following resources are available:

Quill Instructional Coach: You can reach out to us atpd@quill.org. Be sure to mention the course(s) you teach.

Teacher Center: The place to go for all things best practice and implementation!

Support: Having a technical issue? Email support@quill.org or use the chat in the lower right corner of Quill to connect with a member of the Quill support team.

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