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Special Focus:
Writing Persuasively
all the mares he bred to were Morgans as well. The Morgan horse, America’s
first original breed of horse, is bred to be a great athelete, and bloodlines
are carefully analyed to insure the best possible offspring.
“Nate” sired several foals, all of which went on to be successful show
horses themselves and, in some cases, have offspring of their own. It was
then discovered that Nate wasn’t a Morgan. In fact, he was half Saddlebred,
an entirely different breed. As it turned out, the man who bred Nate in
the first place knew. He purposely bred a Morgan stallion to a Saddlebred
mare and, by changing the mare’s name and claiming she was a Morgan,
registered Nate as a full-blooded Morgan.
The Morgan Horse Association panicked. Suddenly over 40 horses in
the registry were found to be related to Nate, and therefore could not be
considered Morgans. Intent on keeping the breed pure, the Association
decided to remove the horses from the registry altogether, therefore
forbidding them to compete or breed. Furious owners retaliated, and
dozens of court hearings and lawsuits took place, eventually leaving the
Association with under $1,000 in its bank account.
Finally, the American Morgan Horse Association won out over the course
of two years of controversy. Still, the owners of the expelled horses need
somewhere to compete. These horses had cost them thousands of dollars,
and they refused to lose that amount of money in horses they couldn’t
use. The Association discussed the situation and decided to create a
special “open breed” competition at Morgan show. Now not only can these
talented horses compete, but the Morgan Horse can remain pure.
Recently a class of 17 AP seniors (all of whom had taken the AP English Language Exam
in spring 2004) considered this sample as a revision exercise. Their immediate responses
after reading the prompt and the essay were—unsurprisingly—confident. They were
quick to see the problems of the essay, and enjoying the comfort of retrospection, each
was sure that his or her essay written on the question last May had not been beset with
such obvious problems. Assigned to groups of three and four, the students were first
asked to look at the essay’s successes. They were surprised; they had assumed that the
focus of the activity would be on the essay’s problems and weaknesses. AP students are
generally comfortable pointing out errors and problems—a mirrored response of their
teachers, I think. Nonetheless, they began to work with the successes of the essay as a
way of understanding and revising the problems, and I was struck by how much more
AP® English Language and Composition: 2006–2007 Workshop Materials 19