AP® English Language and Composition · Big Idea 1 on the AP Exam: Skill 1 and Skill 2 Questions
Skill 1.A Questions: Exigence, Purpose and Context Stems
Exigence questions ask you to name the specific event or problem that made the writer write right now. The answer is almost always buried in the dated details of the headnote, not in general background.
Exigence means the urgent situation that pushed a writer to speak at this exact moment. Four answer choices usually describe things that are all true about the topic, which is why they all look plausible. Only one of them is the specific trigger the piece is actually responding to, and the test buries that trigger in the headnote rather than in the body paragraphs.
The move is to read the headnote for anything dated or timed: a number of days since an event, a season, a vote that did or didn't happen, a notice signed months earlier. Whatever changed right before the piece was written is the exigence. Background facts that stay constant, like the existence of a law or a long-standing inequality, explain why the issue matters but not why the writer wrote today. Cross out any choice that's just true in general, with no clock attached to it.
This same instinct carries into purpose questions sitting right next to exigence ones: purpose is what the writer wants to happen as a result, while exigence is what already happened to provoke the writing. A hypothetical opening, like asking an audience to judge a stranger's record before revealing it's the speaker's own, is a purpose move, building agreement before the ask, built on top of an exigence, usually some recent refusal or broken promise. Keep the two sorted and the choices stop looking identical.
Key terms
- Exigence
- The specific event or problem that creates the need for a piece of writing at the moment it was written.
- Headnote
- The short italicized note before a passage giving its date, author, and occasion.
- Purpose
- What the writer wants the audience to think, feel, or do as a result of the writing.
- Context
- The broader circumstances surrounding a text, including events, audience, and time period.
Watch it explained
- How it worksHow do you use a dated headnote to knock out three of four exigence choices in seconds?
- Worked exampleWalk me through answering 'which best describes the writer's exigence' for a 1913 suffrage address.
- Worked exampleFind the reason a speaker would contrast a hypothetical situation with her own in an opening.
- Common mistakeWhy isn't the most historically accurate option always right on an exigence question?
Check yourself
End of topic.